Wit & Attitude Quote by Daniel Ellsberg

Youth gets indicted here, then instantly acquitted. Ellsberg stacks three self-accusations - young, foolish, arrogant - like a prosecutor building a clean case against the romance of righteous rebellion. Then he snaps the verdict in place: "but we were right". The pivot does two jobs at once. It concedes what polite institutions love to say about dissidents (theyre immature, messy, overconfident) while refusing the more convenient conclusion (therefore they should have stayed quiet). The line is a rebuke to a culture that treats tone as truth: if you were abrasive, you must have been wrong.

Ellsberg is not talking about abstract contrarianism; he's talking about Vietnam, the Pentagon Papers, and the machinery of official lying. The "we" matters. It expands responsibility beyond the lone whistleblower myth and toward a cohort of insiders and activists who misread their own power but not the moral math. Calling themselves arrogant is also tactical humility: he offers critics their favorite word, then denies them its usual payoff.

There's an older American argument embedded in the sentence: history routinely sanitizes movements by pretending their victories were inevitable. Ellsberg resists that comfort. He admits the human flaws that made the fight socially inconvenient, even embarrassing, and insists those flaws dont erase the accuracy of the underlying claim. It's a compact defense of principled disobedience: you can be personally insufferable and still be ethically correct, especially when the state is betting that your imperfect delivery will distract from its perfect violence.