Wit & Attitude Quote by James Thurber

Thurber takes Lincoln's famously reassuring formula about democracy and flips it into a warning label. The joke is structural: you arrive expecting the civic bedtime story - people eventually wise up - and he hands you the uglier corollary. The line works because it compresses a whole theory of mass behavior into a single, unsettling tweak of arithmetic. Not "you can fool some..". but "too many... too much": a quantitative shift that turns optimism into probability, and probability into menace.

As a comedian, Thurber isn't issuing a policy memo; he's puncturing a cultural self-image. Americans like to imagine the public as a corrective force, a crowd that blunders but rebounds. Thurber's subtext is that crowds don't just blunder - they can be managed, sustained, and even comforted in their delusions. "Too many" implies scale, but also complicity: the con isn't just performed on the public; it's performed with the public, because being fooled can be easier than being responsible.

The context is mid-20th-century modernity, when propaganda, mass advertising, radio, and later television professionalized persuasion. Thurber lived through world wars and the rise of authoritarian spectacle abroad, plus the domestic boom in consumer manipulation. His cynicism isn't nihilism; it's a demand for vigilance. The punchline lands because it refuses the soothing cadence of the original saying and replaces it with a blunt truth about how long a bad story can last when enough people want it to.