"There is hardly a man on earth who will take advice unless he is certain that it is positively bad"
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Advice is supposed to be a gift; Burroughs treats it like an irritant. The line lands because it flips a polite social script into something meaner and truer: people don’t resist guidance because they’re uninformed, but because taking advice threatens the one thing they’re always trying to protect - their authorship of their own lives. If you follow someone else’s counsel, you’ve quietly admitted they see the terrain more clearly than you do. Most egos would rather stumble under their own banner.
Burroughs, a nature writer steeped in observation, isn’t really talking about “men” as a gendered category so much as a specimen: the human animal. The subtext is Darwinian. We treat advice as a dominance display, a pecking-order move masquerading as concern. That’s why “positively bad” is the joke’s sharpest turn. Bad advice feels safe because it can be rejected without cost; it lets the listener keep control while performing discernment. Even better, if the speaker’s counsel is obviously wrong, the listener gets the pleasure of superiority: thank you for the input, now watch me be the competent one.
The period matters, too. Burroughs wrote in an America infatuated with self-reliance, where autonomy was moral currency and “mind your own business” was practically civic doctrine. Against that backdrop, his cynicism reads less like misanthropy and more like field notes: a warning that the hardest part of helping people isn’t knowing what to say, it’s realizing that being right often makes you unusable.
Burroughs, a nature writer steeped in observation, isn’t really talking about “men” as a gendered category so much as a specimen: the human animal. The subtext is Darwinian. We treat advice as a dominance display, a pecking-order move masquerading as concern. That’s why “positively bad” is the joke’s sharpest turn. Bad advice feels safe because it can be rejected without cost; it lets the listener keep control while performing discernment. Even better, if the speaker’s counsel is obviously wrong, the listener gets the pleasure of superiority: thank you for the input, now watch me be the competent one.
The period matters, too. Burroughs wrote in an America infatuated with self-reliance, where autonomy was moral currency and “mind your own business” was practically civic doctrine. Against that backdrop, his cynicism reads less like misanthropy and more like field notes: a warning that the hardest part of helping people isn’t knowing what to say, it’s realizing that being right often makes you unusable.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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