Art & Creativity Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes is laying out an elitist paradox with a democrat’s disguise: write in words everyone can read, but structure the thought so only the truly capable can applaud it. The line isn’t just a stylistic tip; it’s a political posture. In a 17th-century England shredded by civil war, pamphlets, sermons, and polemics, “plain speech” was a weapon. Hobbes famously favored clarity over scholastic fog, yet he also distrusted the crowd’s judgment and the chaos that mass persuasion could unleash. So he proposes a kind of rhetorical sieve: accessibility without surrender.

The intent is twofold. First, it’s an ethical claim about intellectual responsibility. If your prose requires a priesthood of interpreters, you’re either hiding weak reasoning or building a private empire of authority. Second, it’s a social claim about reputation: praise should be costly. Hobbes wants commendation to function like peer review, not applause at a rally. “Understood by all” keeps him aligned with reason and public argument; “commended by wise men only” secures hierarchy, distinguishing genuine insight from fashionable noise.

The subtext is anxious and strategic. Hobbes knows that ideas powerful enough to reorder society can be swallowed, misused, or weaponized by non-experts. He’s implicitly arguing for a style that is transparent in vocabulary but demanding in logic: no mystification, no pandering, no populist shortcuts. It’s a philosophy of writing designed to survive both censorship and misreading, and to win the only audience that, in Hobbes’s view, should matter: those disciplined enough to follow the argument all the way to its uncomfortable end.