There’s as much crookedness as you want to find. There was something Abraham Lincoln said - he’d rather trust and be disappointed than distrust and be miserable all the time. Maybe I trusted too much.

Wooden contrasts two habitual stances toward other people: a suspicious outlook that constantly “finds” wrongdoing, and a trusting outlook that accepts the risk of occasional disappointment. By saying “There’s as much crookedness as you want to find,” he suggests that cynicism can become a self-fulfilling lens—if you look for bad faith everywhere, you will interpret events to confirm it. The attributed Lincoln maxim frames trust as a deliberate moral and psychological choice: better to risk being let down than to live in perpetual misery from distrust. Wooden’s closing admission (“Maybe I trusted too much”) adds humility, acknowledging that trust can be costly while still implying it is preferable to corrosive suspicion.