Wit & Attitude Quote by Kin Hubbard

Ignorance rarely gets defended so cheerfully. Kin Hubbard’s line turns a familiar proverb ("ignorance is bliss") into a Midwestern side-eye at the era’s rising information appetite: if not knowing keeps you comfortable, why go hunting for trouble in your neighbor’s headlines?

The joke works because it’s domesticated. He doesn’t invoke libraries or politics; he invokes borrowing a newspaper, the everyday ritual of small-town America when papers were the social bloodstream and gossip traveled as “news.” That neighbor detail matters: knowledge isn’t just available, it’s communal, contagious, and faintly invasive. Borrowing the paper implies curiosity mixed with thrift, but Hubbard reframes it as moral and emotional risk. You’re not just saving a nickel; you’re importing someone else’s anxieties.

Subtextually, Hubbard is skewering two types at once. First, the self-styled “informed” citizen who treats grim headlines as a kind of virtue signal, collecting worry like receipts. Second, the smug contentment of chosen ignorance, which he portrays not as noble simplicity but as a cozy, slightly petty strategy: if bliss depends on not knowing, then seeking facts is “foolish,” not brave.

As a journalist, Hubbard is also taking a sly jab at his own industry. Newspapers sell urgency. They monetize outrage, scandal, and civic dread. The line reads like a wink from inside the machine: our product is so reliably disturbing that the only rational consumer move, if you prize serenity, is to abstain. It’s humor with a quiet accusation: the news doesn’t just inform you; it recruits you into everyone else’s problems.