Wit & Attitude Quote by Joseph Addison

Addison’s jab lands with the polite precision of a man who knew exactly how vicious “polite” could be. “Stupid and uncharitable” is a two-part indictment: intellect and ethics, reason and temperament. He isn’t merely warning against being wrong; he’s calling out the mental laziness and moral vanity that make certainty feel like virtue. In his world, insisting that truth lives only on “his own side” isn’t conviction, it’s self-worship dressed up as principle.

The line also carries an almost surgical understanding of factional politics. Early 18th-century England was a petri dish of party identity (Whigs and Tories), religious suspicion, and pamphlet warfare, and Addison - a leading essayist of the Spectator era - helped invent the tone of the “reasonable public.” His project was civic: to discipline the passions of an emerging middle-class reading culture, to make moderation look not weak but sophisticated. This sentence does that by making exclusivist certainty socially embarrassing.

The subtext is strategic: pluralism isn’t sold as a noble ideal; it’s framed as the bare minimum for anyone who wants to be taken seriously. Notice how he concedes “virtue or truth” can exist across the aisle without pretending all sides are equally right. The point isn’t relativism. It’s an argument for intellectual humility as a form of public decency - and a reminder that political “sides” are often just mirrors we use to admire ourselves.