"An intellectual hatred is the worst"
About this Quote
Yeats compresses a hard-won suspicion into a single, bracing assertion: when hatred dresses itself in reason, it becomes relentless. Personal animosities flare and fade, but a grievance buttressed by ideas, arguments, and systems acquires a chilling durability. It persuades itself that cruelty is virtue, that exclusion is clarity, that the ends require a purity no human being can meet. Such hatred is not hot and impulsive; it is cool, organized, and endlessly resourceful in finding justifications.
The line appears in A Prayer for My Daughter, written in 1919 as Yeats paced his storm-battered tower with his infant asleep upstairs. The world outside was convulsed by the aftermath of the Easter Rising and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence; noble ideals had already shown their capacity to harden into fanaticism. Yeats had seen political and cultural movements fracture lives, and he had known the magnetic pull of charismatic certainty in figures like Maud Gonne. Turning from public tumult to private hope, he asks that his daughter grow up among courtesies rather than slogans, that her mind not stiffen into contempt masked as principle.
An intellectual hatred is the worst because it recruits the faculties that should restrain hatred to serve it instead. Thought becomes a weapon, memory becomes a ledger of wrongs, and language becomes a tool for exclusion. Hatred that believes it is enlightened will not admit correction; it multiplies reasons to despise and calls that multiplication wisdom. Yeats answers not with anti-intellectualism but with a hierarchy of virtues: humility, affection, rootedness in tradition, the civilizing force of ceremony. He wants intelligence tempered by love, judgment softened by the awareness of human frailty.
The phrase reads freshly in any age of ideological certainty. Abstractions can make us forget the faces they cover. Yeats warns that when cleverness meets bitterness, the result corrodes both public life and the private heart. The task is to keep the mind brilliant without letting it grow cold.
The line appears in A Prayer for My Daughter, written in 1919 as Yeats paced his storm-battered tower with his infant asleep upstairs. The world outside was convulsed by the aftermath of the Easter Rising and the beginning of the Irish War of Independence; noble ideals had already shown their capacity to harden into fanaticism. Yeats had seen political and cultural movements fracture lives, and he had known the magnetic pull of charismatic certainty in figures like Maud Gonne. Turning from public tumult to private hope, he asks that his daughter grow up among courtesies rather than slogans, that her mind not stiffen into contempt masked as principle.
An intellectual hatred is the worst because it recruits the faculties that should restrain hatred to serve it instead. Thought becomes a weapon, memory becomes a ledger of wrongs, and language becomes a tool for exclusion. Hatred that believes it is enlightened will not admit correction; it multiplies reasons to despise and calls that multiplication wisdom. Yeats answers not with anti-intellectualism but with a hierarchy of virtues: humility, affection, rootedness in tradition, the civilizing force of ceremony. He wants intelligence tempered by love, judgment softened by the awareness of human frailty.
The phrase reads freshly in any age of ideological certainty. Abstractions can make us forget the faces they cover. Yeats warns that when cleverness meets bitterness, the result corrodes both public life and the private heart. The task is to keep the mind brilliant without letting it grow cold.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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