Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Johnson

Trust, Johnson suggests, is less a moral achievement than a bookkeeping error. Strangers feel credible not because theyve earned it, but because they havent had the chance to disappoint us. The line has the cool bite of eighteenth-century social observation: a diagnosis of how the mind protects itself by confusing an empty record with a clean one.

Johnson is poking at a familiar vanity. We like to imagine ourselves as good judges of character, yet we routinely outsource judgment to distance. The person we dont know becomes a blank screen for our wishes: impartial, unmessy, untainted by the petty contradictions that accumulate in real relationships. Meanwhile the people closest to us carry the burden of their documented missteps. One lie, one broken promise, one bad week and the file stays open forever. The stranger, by contrast, gets the benefit of a virgin dossier.

The subtext is not that everyone is deceitful; its that our criteria for belief are warped by memory and proximity. We punish the known for being human and reward the unknown for being untested. Its a subtle critique of social and political credulity, too: distant authorities, fashionable writers, and charismatic newcomers can seem trustworthy precisely because they arrive without a personal history. In Johnsons London - dense with pamphlets, rumors, reputations made and ruined in coffeehouses - this is also practical advice. Familiarity breeds not contempt, exactly, but evidence.