Life & Wisdom Quote by Quentin Crisp

Crisp’s line cuts with the kind of glittering pessimism that sounds like dinner-party epigram and functions like field intelligence. He’s not offering comfort; he’s warning against the lazy narrative we love to tell ourselves: that silence equals reconciliation, that the temperature drop in a room means hearts have warmed. For Crisp, hostility doesn’t evaporate into goodwill. It reallocates. The enemy hasn’t matured; they’ve triaged.

The intent is defensive clarity. If you’ve lived as a public affront to social norms, you learn that “acceptance” often arrives only after you’ve been safely defanged - older, poorer, less visible, less contagious. Crisp, a famously flamboyant gay man formed by prewar and postwar Britain, understood that persecution can be loud, but it can also be administrative: the quiet shifting of attention once the target no longer seems capable of altering the order of things. In that sense, “abatement” isn’t mercy; it’s a threat assessment report.

The subtext is almost cruelly pragmatic: enemies don’t need to be persuaded if time can do the job. If you stop being dangerous, they stop spending energy on you. That reframes civility as strategy, not ethics. It’s also a bracing critique of liberal self-congratulation - the belief that society improves because it becomes kinder, rather than because the people it once attacked have been rendered non-threatening, assimilated, or simply exhausted.

What makes the line work is its compression: it turns a seemingly positive social signal into proof of marginalization’s endgame. You didn’t win them over. You were filed away.