Life & Wisdom Quote by Jonathan Swift

Pride is a better glue than truth, and Swift knows it. "There are few, very few, that will own themselves in a mistake" is less a casual observation than a diagnosis of the social machinery that keeps folly in motion. The doubled emphasis - "few, very few" - isn’t just rhetorical flourish; it’s Swift’s way of shrinking the moral minority to near invisibility. He writes like someone who has watched reasonable arguments bounce off human vanity and decided the real antagonist isn’t ignorance, but self-protection.

The key phrase is "own themselves". Swift isn’t talking about admitting an error the way you might concede a miscalculation; he’s talking about identity. To "own" a mistake is to accept that the self who made it is still you, not an impostor, not a temporary lapse, not a misunderstanding engineered by enemies. That’s precisely what most people resist. Confession feels like eviction: you’re forced to relocate your ego from the comforting story of competence into the messier story of fallibility.

Swift’s context matters. As a master satirist in a bruising public sphere of pamphlets, faction, and religious-political dogma, he saw how rarely people updated beliefs when reality intervened. They doubled down, changed the subject, blamed a scapegoat - anything but absorb the sting of being wrong. The line lands because it’s both moral and tactical: it exposes error-admission as a social act, costly in reputation, and therefore avoided. Swift’s cynicism isn’t despair; it’s leverage. If you want reform, he implies, don’t appeal to people’s reason alone. Aim at the incentives that make denial feel safer than honesty.