Daily Inspiration Quote by Philip Guedalla

Guedalla’s line has the snap of a historian who’s watched too many grand ideas die from petty blows. “Any stigma” is a deliberately cheap weapon: not argument, not evidence, just a smear, a whiff of social contamination. Set against “dogma,” it’s an asymmetrical fight. Dogma sounds fortified, systematic, even solemn; stigma is portable, lazy, and brutally efficient. The wit is in the mismatch. We like to imagine entrenched beliefs fall when they’re disproved. Guedalla suggests they’re more often toppled by reputational napalm: guilt by association, a scandal, a label that makes decent people back away.

The subtext is about how persuasion actually works in public life. Dogma lives in institutions, sermons, party platforms, and textbooks, but it also lives in people’s desire to belong. Stigma attacks that social circuitry. Make a creed embarrassing, unfashionable, or “tainted,” and you don’t have to refute it; you just have to make it awkward to repeat at dinner. The phrase “will do” is the cynical flourish: it implies interchangeability, as if any handy slur from the cultural toolbox can be redeployed to discipline thought.

Context matters. Guedalla wrote in an era when mass politics, tabloids, and propaganda were modernizing character assassination, and when ideological certainty was hardening across Europe. As a historian, he’s less moralizing than diagnosing: in the marketplace of ideas, the counter-idea isn’t always a better one. Sometimes it’s just a better sneer.