Life & Wisdom Quote by Washington Irving

Irving’s jab lands because it weaponizes a body type as a political diagnosis. “Fat men” aren’t just well-fed; they’re imagined as comfortable enough to prefer stability over upheaval. The “lean, hungry men,” by contrast, aren’t merely thin. They’re restless, status-anxious, perpetually alert to insult and exclusion. Irving isn’t offering sociology so much as a caricature that lets readers see class friction as physiology: revolution as metabolism.

The intent is slippery. On the surface it’s comic contempt for rabble-rousers, a neat visual gag that turns collective anger into a matter of ribs showing. Underneath, it’s a conservative theory of disorder: riots come from deprivation, yes, but also from the temperament that deprivation breeds. “Continually worrying society” suggests the agitator as a kind of mosquito - small, persistent, impossible to ignore. The phrase “setting the whole community by the ears” is old idiom, but it still pops: one person’s grievance becomes contagious noise.

Context matters: Irving writes in an early American moment where crowds, pamphlets, and street politics are becoming a genuine force, and where elites are both fascinated and unnerved by mass participation. His line flatters the reader’s desire to believe unrest is caused by a recognizable “type,” not by structural failures that implicate everyone. It’s humor with an alibi: laugh at the “lean” troublemakers and you don’t have to ask what they’re hungry for - or who benefits from them staying that way.