Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Savage

Anger, in Richard Savage's hands, isn't a moral failure so much as a misdirected instrument. The line frames rage as a bodily implant, a "sting" with a clear telos: pain that points outward, toward evil, not sideways, toward our neighbors. That metaphor does a lot of work. A sting is quick, involuntary, and protective; it suggests anger is native to us and occasionally necessary, while also warning that it can be turned like a weapon in the wrong direction. Savage isn't romanticizing fury. He's trying to discipline it.

The religious staging matters. "Gnash with our teeth" is biblical language, associated with judgment and torment, but Savage repurposes it as righteous resistance: anger is meant to harden you against the devil, not soften you into petty feuds. The subtext is social as much as spiritual. By pleading "not to set us in array against each other", he is diagnosing a community where anger has become a faction-making machine - a force that organizes people into camps, then convinces them the other camp is the real enemy.

Context sharpens the edge. Savage lived amid Georgian London's churn of patronage, scandal, and public moralizing, where reputations were currency and outrage was performance. His own life was marred by poverty and volatility, making this sound less like detached sermonizing and more like self-instruction: a man trying to convert personal heat into ethical direction. The quote works because it admits anger's energy while insisting it must be aimed - an early argument that the problem isn't rage itself, it's who benefits from where we point it.