Wit & Attitude Quote by Scott Adams

Adams’s line works because it’s a provocation disguised as a “hard truth.” The phrasing is engineered for the smug little click of recognition: you’re invited to nod along, safely positioned outside “the general public,” even though you are, inconveniently, in it. That’s the joke and the bait. “Never underestimate” gives it the cadence of a rule, like advice from someone who’s been burned by crowds, committees, comment sections. It’s cynicism packaged as competence.

The subtext is less about stupidity than about power. If the public is reliably foolish, then elites, managers, “systems thinkers,” and persuasion artists become necessary caretakers. That logic flatters the speaker’s role: the cartoonist as clear-eyed observer, the lone adult in a room of toddlers. It also smuggles in a permission structure for contempt. Once you define a mass as dumb, you can stop listening to it and start manipulating it.

Context matters because Adams’s public persona has long orbited around office politics, institutional inertia, and the idea that rational plans routinely lose to irrational incentives. In the Dilbert universe, stupidity is the engine of plot: it explains why bad meetings happen, why slogans beat facts, why the wrong people get promoted. The quote compresses that worldview into a portable one-liner suited for social media and talk-radio fatalism.

It lands because it’s emotionally useful. In an era of misinformation and partisan spectacle, calling the public stupid offers instant relief: your confusion becomes diagnosis, your frustration becomes superiority. The cost is that it turns democratic failure into a character defect of “them,” not a systems problem we’re all implicated in.