Happiness Quote by Harry Emerson Fosdick

The line lands like a moral boomerang: your ridicule doesn’t travel outward and stop; it arcs back and tags you. Fosdick, a prominent early-20th-century Protestant preacher with a knack for plainspoken psychological insight, isn’t offering a cute proverb. He’s issuing a diagnostic. The object of your laughter in someone else is rarely “them” in any clean sense - it’s the part of you you’re trying to disown.

The verb choice matters. It’s not “reflects” or “reveals”; it “laughs.” Fosdick makes your mockery feel alive, almost predatory, as if contempt is a creature you’ve fed and now can’t control. That person’s awkwardness, vanity, optimism, piety, ambition - whatever you’re scoffing at - becomes a mirror that doesn’t just show you your face, it smirks at it. The subtext is that laughter can be a form of self-defense: a way to mark distance from traits you fear you share, or could share if your circumstances shifted.

Context sharpens the point. Fosdick preached through the rise of modern mass culture, urban anonymity, and the temptations of public performance - eras that expanded the audience for humiliation and made moral superiority feel like entertainment. His pastoral instinct is to interrupt that easy sport. The intent isn’t to ban laughter; it’s to make you notice what your laughter is buying you: momentary status, paid for with self-knowledge you’d rather avoid.