Wit & Attitude Quote by John Stuart Mill

A Victorian liberal throwing a punch and then pretending to adjust his cuff. Mill’s line is engineered to sound like a sober distinction ("not all... but most...") while smuggling in a social insult that would have landed hard in a culture obsessed with respectability. The first clause offers plausible fairness, a prophylactic against charges of mere partisan sneering; the second clause does the real work, turning conservatism into a kind of statistical refuge for the incurious. It’s rhetoric as trapdoor: grant him the caveat, and you’re already halfway to accepting the slur.

The intent isn’t just to dunk on political opponents. It’s to delegitimize a type of resistance Mill saw as structurally opposed to his project: expanding liberty, education, and rational public debate in an era of franchise fights, religious authority, and class entrenchment. "Conservative" here reads less as a party label than as a disposition: deference to custom, suspicion of reform, comfort with inherited hierarchy. "Stupid" isn’t simply low IQ; it’s the chosen refusal to think past habit. Mill’s deeper accusation is moral and civic: stupidity as a political resource, a stabilizing force for the status quo.

Context matters because Mill was writing against what he feared were the tyrannies of tradition and unexamined opinion. The line’s bite comes from its asymmetry: it doesn’t claim conservatives can’t be brilliant (they can), it claims that stupidity has somewhere dependable to go. That’s why it works - not as a rigorous argument, but as a scalpel aimed at the cultural prestige of being "sensible" and "moderate", exposing that pose as, sometimes, a mask for intellectual laziness.