Wit & Attitude Quote by Charles de Montesquieu

Montesquieu’s jab lands because it weaponizes a fear every writer secretly has: that the urge to publish is less vocation than vanity with a printing press. Calling the author a “fool” isn’t just insult; it’s a diagnostic. The fool mistakes output for value, and permanence for importance. The line is built on escalation: it starts with the intimate circle (“those he lives with”) where boredom is immediate, undeniable, and socially costly, then stretches the offense across time. To “insist” on boring “future generations” turns authorship into a kind of intergenerational nuisance, like leaving your clutter in the attic and charging descendants admission.

The subtext is an Enlightenment critique of self-regard dressed up as wit. Montesquieu lived in a culture of salons, pamphlets, and reputations made through print; writing was both intellectual labor and social performance. In that world, boredom wasn’t minor. It was a moral failure, proof you lacked taste, proportion, and the ability to see beyond yourself. His joke is really about restraint: the right to speak isn’t the same as the right to demand attention.

It also smuggles in a standard for public writing: if your work can’t hold the people closest to you, why should strangers, let alone posterity, owe you their hours? The barb polices the boundary between contribution and clutter, reminding would-be immortals that time is the one resource readers never get back.