"There is nobody so irritating as somebody with less intelligence and more sense than we have"
About this Quote
Herold’s line lands because it refuses the polite fiction that intelligence is always the highest currency. The real irritant, he suggests, isn’t the dumb person or the wise person; it’s the person who exposes how little our cleverness helps when it can’t cash out into good judgment. “Less intelligence and more sense” is a deliberately barbed pairing: it frames sense as practical competence, social calibration, and the ability to choose the right hill to die on, while “intelligence” becomes performative sparkle, argument-winning, and status. The joke is that we’re not annoyed by their deficiency, but by their advantage.
The subtext is ego management. We can tolerate someone “smarter” because it keeps the hierarchy legible: they’re above us, fine. We can tolerate someone “dumber” because we can patronize them. The person with less intelligence but more sense scrambles the scoreboard. They’re the colleague who doesn’t speak in meeting but somehow ships the project. The friend who can’t quote the discourse but reads the room flawlessly. They don’t just disagree; they make our sophistication look like a hobby.
Contextually, Herold wrote in an early-20th-century America increasingly enamored with IQ, expertise, and the prestige of being “bright.” His quip punctures that modern faith. It’s also an indictment of a particular kind of educated vanity: the belief that being able to analyze something equals being able to live it. The line works as self-implication, too. “Than we have” gives away the narrator’s insecurity; the irritation is confession. Herold isn’t celebrating anti-intellectualism. He’s mocking the fragile pride of the intellectual who can’t stand losing to common sense.
The subtext is ego management. We can tolerate someone “smarter” because it keeps the hierarchy legible: they’re above us, fine. We can tolerate someone “dumber” because we can patronize them. The person with less intelligence but more sense scrambles the scoreboard. They’re the colleague who doesn’t speak in meeting but somehow ships the project. The friend who can’t quote the discourse but reads the room flawlessly. They don’t just disagree; they make our sophistication look like a hobby.
Contextually, Herold wrote in an early-20th-century America increasingly enamored with IQ, expertise, and the prestige of being “bright.” His quip punctures that modern faith. It’s also an indictment of a particular kind of educated vanity: the belief that being able to analyze something equals being able to live it. The line works as self-implication, too. “Than we have” gives away the narrator’s insecurity; the irritation is confession. Herold isn’t celebrating anti-intellectualism. He’s mocking the fragile pride of the intellectual who can’t stand losing to common sense.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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