Life & Wisdom Quote by Marilyn French

French is describing prejudice as a scavenger hunt with a prewritten ending: if you start with the hunger to rank someone lower, evidence will obediently appear. That first clause, “Anyone determined,” matters. Inferiority isn’t discovered; it’s manufactured through selection. The “whole lists of grounds” she mentions are the bureaucratic props of bias: IQ scores, manners, accents, family structure, “culture,” productivity, patriotism. Lists feel objective, and that’s the point. They let moral aggression dress up as neutral assessment.

The sharper turn comes at the end: “because we are all inferior to the ideals of humanness we have erected.” French isn’t letting the reader perch above the problem. She’s arguing that the standards used to condemn others are themselves impossibly aspirational - sanctified images of what a “real” human should be: rational but not emotional, independent but not selfish, pure but not naive, strong but not threatening. Once a society treats those ideals as entry requirements rather than guiding stars, everyone becomes fail-able, which makes hierarchy endlessly renewable.

Her subtext is feminist and political: patriarchy (and other dominance systems) survives by moving the goalposts of “proper” personhood, then punishing whoever can’t clear them - often women, racialized groups, the poor, the queer, the disabled. The quote’s context, coming from a novelist and essayist steeped in second-wave feminism, reads like a warning about how easily “human nature” becomes a weapon. If perfection is the yardstick, contempt is always measurable.