The Emperor’s New Clothes

Everyone along the route could see. Not one of them would be the first, because the price of being first was to be the only one, and so the procession went the whole way and the cheering never once faltered.

Then a child said the plain thing, and the crowd heard its own voice come back to it out of a stranger’s mouth.

— after Hans Christian Andersen, Kejserens nye Klæder, 1837