If everybody minded their own business, the world would go round a good deal faster than it does.

The line is spoken by the Duchess in Lewis Carroll’s children’s fantasy novel *Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland* (1865), during Alice’s chaotic encounter with her in the Duchess’s kitchen. The Duchess is a caricature of officious, moralizing authority: she intrudes, lectures, and draws sweeping “lessons” from nonsense. Her remark about everyone minding their own business comes amid the book’s broader satire of social manners and adult didacticism, where characters confidently utter maxims that sound wise but are often illogical or self-serving. In context, the statement functions less as sober advice than as part of Carroll’s comic exposure of how platitudes can be used to justify rudeness and control.

On its surface, the quote endorses privacy and non-interference: if people stopped meddling, life would proceed more efficiently. But in *Wonderland* the speaker matters. The Duchess—herself intrusive and domineering—delivers the maxim with hypocritical certainty, turning a common-sense idea into a comic contradiction. Carroll thus invites readers to hear both the apparent moral and its parody: “mind your own business” can be a reasonable social principle, yet it can also be wielded as a dismissive slogan to silence others or excuse one’s own bad behavior. The line exemplifies Carroll’s technique of making familiar Victorian moralizing sound absurd when placed in an irrational world.