"We find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as our own, but they probably are"
About this Quote
The line lands like a genteel ambush: it flatters our seriousness for a beat, then pulls the rug with a shrugging “but they probably are.” Robinson’s historian’s instinct is doing double duty here. He’s diagnosing an everyday cognitive vanity - the reflex to treat our inner monologue as uniquely rational while assuming everyone else is running on superstition, bias, or noise. Then he levels the field, not by exalting others, but by admitting the embarrassing baseline: most thinking, including ours, is a messy draft.
The wit is in the symmetry. He doesn’t claim people are wise beneath their mistakes; he claims they’re similarly ridiculous beneath their confidence. That’s less comforting than egalitarian. It’s also more useful. The subtext is an argument for epistemic humility without preaching it: if your thoughts are often half-formed, self-serving, and story-shaped, it’s irrational to imagine your neighbors are any different.
Placed in Robinson’s early-20th-century context - when “scientific” modernity was reorganizing education, politics, and public opinion - the quote reads as a small corrective to Progress-era faith in expertise and to crowd-level certainty. Historians watch hindsight harden into inevitability; Robinson is warning that our private certainty is just another historical artifact in the making.
It works because it punctures arrogance with self-recognition, not scolding. You laugh, then you flinch, then you’re slightly less eager to treat your certainty as a credential.
The wit is in the symmetry. He doesn’t claim people are wise beneath their mistakes; he claims they’re similarly ridiculous beneath their confidence. That’s less comforting than egalitarian. It’s also more useful. The subtext is an argument for epistemic humility without preaching it: if your thoughts are often half-formed, self-serving, and story-shaped, it’s irrational to imagine your neighbors are any different.
Placed in Robinson’s early-20th-century context - when “scientific” modernity was reorganizing education, politics, and public opinion - the quote reads as a small corrective to Progress-era faith in expertise and to crowd-level certainty. Historians watch hindsight harden into inevitability; Robinson is warning that our private certainty is just another historical artifact in the making.
It works because it punctures arrogance with self-recognition, not scolding. You laugh, then you flinch, then you’re slightly less eager to treat your certainty as a credential.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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