"Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope"
About this Quote
Aristotle lands the jab with surgeon-level calm: the young aren’t gullible because they’re stupid; they’re gullible because they’re future-oriented. “Quick to hope” is the key phrase. Hope isn’t framed as a virtue here but as a cognitive accelerant, a bias that makes the next promising story feel more real than the current facts. Youth, in Aristotle’s view, lives on credit, emotionally and intellectually: it borrows confidence from what might be, then spends it as certainty.
The line works because it recasts deception as a collaboration. The deceiver isn’t just imposing lies; the deceived are supplying the demand. Hope is the mechanism that lowers the evidentiary bar. If you want something to be true badly enough, you start treating desire as data. That’s not moral condemnation so much as a diagnosis of tempo: youth moves fast, and fast-moving minds accept rough sketches as finished maps.
Context matters: Aristotle is cataloging character types and the psychology of persuasion in works like the Rhetoric, where age isn’t a number but a bundle of tendencies that affect judgment. Young people are depicted as passionate, confident, hungry for ideals; older people as cautious, even suspicious. The subtext is political and pedagogical: if you’re trying to govern, teach, or persuade, you exploit or guard against this hopeful speed. Read today, it’s a warning about startup mythologies, influencer certainty, and ideological recruitment. Hope makes a person brave; it also makes them easy to sell to.
The line works because it recasts deception as a collaboration. The deceiver isn’t just imposing lies; the deceived are supplying the demand. Hope is the mechanism that lowers the evidentiary bar. If you want something to be true badly enough, you start treating desire as data. That’s not moral condemnation so much as a diagnosis of tempo: youth moves fast, and fast-moving minds accept rough sketches as finished maps.
Context matters: Aristotle is cataloging character types and the psychology of persuasion in works like the Rhetoric, where age isn’t a number but a bundle of tendencies that affect judgment. Young people are depicted as passionate, confident, hungry for ideals; older people as cautious, even suspicious. The subtext is political and pedagogical: if you’re trying to govern, teach, or persuade, you exploit or guard against this hopeful speed. Read today, it’s a warning about startup mythologies, influencer certainty, and ideological recruitment. Hope makes a person brave; it also makes them easy to sell to.
Quote Details
| Topic | Youth |
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