"All evil comes from the old.They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them"
About this Quote
A line like this doesn’t argue; it indicts. Anouilh aims his blade at the comfortable custodians of “ideas” - the elders who no longer pay for their convictions with their bodies. The cruelty lands in the imagery: the old “grow fat,” a grotesque, domestic verb that turns ideology into cuisine, while the young “die,” a blunt terminal fact. In two beats, the quote exposes an asymmetry at the heart of political and moral crusades: those who draft the slogans are rarely the ones conscripted by them.
The intent isn’t simply anti-old; it’s anti-impunity. “The old” functions as a class: legislators, generals, priestly moralists, intellectuals who can afford purity because the bill is sent elsewhere. Ideas, in Anouilh’s theater, aren’t airy abstractions. They’re scripts that demand actors, and the actors are often young men with uniforms and graves waiting. The subtext carries postwar bitterness: Anouilh wrote in a France haunted by collaboration, resistance mythmaking, and the obscene ease with which rhetoric can be laundered after catastrophe. The line reads as a warning against retrospective heroism - the kind that turns messy history into a moral pageant once the risk has passed.
As a playwright, Anouilh understands performance: “ideas” don’t just persuade, they mobilize, and they flatter the speaker as much as they “serve” the cause. The quote works because it collapses lofty principle into a bodily economy: someone feeds, someone bleeds.
The intent isn’t simply anti-old; it’s anti-impunity. “The old” functions as a class: legislators, generals, priestly moralists, intellectuals who can afford purity because the bill is sent elsewhere. Ideas, in Anouilh’s theater, aren’t airy abstractions. They’re scripts that demand actors, and the actors are often young men with uniforms and graves waiting. The subtext carries postwar bitterness: Anouilh wrote in a France haunted by collaboration, resistance mythmaking, and the obscene ease with which rhetoric can be laundered after catastrophe. The line reads as a warning against retrospective heroism - the kind that turns messy history into a moral pageant once the risk has passed.
As a playwright, Anouilh understands performance: “ideas” don’t just persuade, they mobilize, and they flatter the speaker as much as they “serve” the cause. The quote works because it collapses lofty principle into a bodily economy: someone feeds, someone bleeds.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
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