"A nickname is the heaviest stone that the devil can throw at a man. It is a bugbear to the imagination, and, though we do not believe in it, it still haunts our apprehensions"
About this Quote
Hazlitt treats the nickname as a kind of petty folklore with real bruising force: not a clever label, but a weapon that gains mass precisely because it’s small enough to be tossed around. Calling it “the heaviest stone” the devil can throw is a sly escalation. The insult isn’t grand tragedy; it’s schoolyard cruelty, street gossip, the cheap shot. That’s Hazlitt’s point. The nickname works because it’s portable, repeatable, and social. It turns a person into a public object.
The subtext is about how identity gets outsourced. A nickname is language doing what institutions do: fixing you in place. It collapses complexity into one sticky trait, then makes that reduction feel inevitable. Hazlitt’s “bugbear to the imagination” is psychologically acute. Even when the rational mind rejects the tag as unfair or stupid, the imagination keeps auditioning it in other people’s mouths. The harm isn’t only external ridicule; it’s the internal rehearsal, the anxious anticipation of being misseen.
Context matters: Hazlitt was a critic in an age when reputations were made and mangled in coffeehouses, pamphlets, and periodicals. A public culture built on wit also built a machinery for attaching names to people and letting the nickname do the argumentative work. In that world, the “devil” isn’t supernatural; it’s the crowd’s appetite for a simple story. Hazlitt’s warning lands because it understands humiliation as a narrative technology: one word that keeps rewriting you, even after you stop believing it.
The subtext is about how identity gets outsourced. A nickname is language doing what institutions do: fixing you in place. It collapses complexity into one sticky trait, then makes that reduction feel inevitable. Hazlitt’s “bugbear to the imagination” is psychologically acute. Even when the rational mind rejects the tag as unfair or stupid, the imagination keeps auditioning it in other people’s mouths. The harm isn’t only external ridicule; it’s the internal rehearsal, the anxious anticipation of being misseen.
Context matters: Hazlitt was a critic in an age when reputations were made and mangled in coffeehouses, pamphlets, and periodicals. A public culture built on wit also built a machinery for attaching names to people and letting the nickname do the argumentative work. In that world, the “devil” isn’t supernatural; it’s the crowd’s appetite for a simple story. Hazlitt’s warning lands because it understands humiliation as a narrative technology: one word that keeps rewriting you, even after you stop believing it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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