Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth.

The line is a sardonic epigram about social taste and exclusivity: most people, the speaker implies, exist chiefly to make a smaller, preferred minority seem more desirable by contrast. It plays on the arithmetic of “nine-tenths” versus “one-tenth” to frame society as a hierarchy of refinement, where boredom or dissatisfaction with the many drives one toward the select few. Read as Walpolean wit, it also mocks the very impulse it expresses—exposing how social distinction can depend on disparaging the crowd. The quip’s sting lies in its reduction of human variety to a social function: the majority become mere backdrop for elite companionship.