Wit & Attitude Quote by Maxim Gorky

Gorky’s line flatters no one, which is exactly the point. It refuses the comforting modern myth that intelligence naturally trends toward virtue. Goodness, he implies, can be almost blunt: a person can fumble, misunderstand, fail to grasp the game, and still act decently. Moral worth doesn’t require brilliance; it requires a stubborn baseline of conscience.

Badness, though, is portrayed as a craft. “A bad man must have brains” isn’t praise; it’s an accusation. Harm on a meaningful scale tends to demand planning, persuasion, and self-justification. The stupid villain is a nuisance. The intelligent one is a system-builder: he learns which rules can be bent, which words can launder cruelty into necessity, which institutions can be captured quietly. Gorky is pointing at the bureaucratic, managerial face of evil long before that idea had a hashtag.

Context matters. Writing out of late imperial Russia’s brutality and the coming revolutionary order, Gorky watched ideology and power intertwine. His world was full of people who were rough, uneducated, and still capable of generosity; it was also crowded with clever operators able to turn poverty, fear, and resentment into leverage. The aphorism carries a proletarian skepticism toward “smart” culture: intelligence is not a halo, it’s a tool, and tools serve whoever grips them.

The subtext lands uncomfortably today: we’re quick to excuse the charismatic, high-IQ transgressor as “complicated,” while dismissing the simple decent person as naive. Gorky flips that hierarchy and warns where the real danger usually lives.