Wit & Attitude Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s jab lands because it flatters and insults in the same breath: if you survived a classical education without becoming a fool, you didn’t graduate so much as slip the noose. The line is built on a sly inversion of the era’s pieties. In early 19th-century Britain, the “regular gradations” of Latin and Greek weren’t just a curriculum; they were a social sorting machine, a way of manufacturing authority, polish, and deference. Hazlitt, a critic with a dissenter’s instincts, refuses to treat that machinery as neutral.

The phrase “made a fool by it” is the tell. He’s not attacking learning; he’s attacking the kind of learning that trains people to confuse quotation with judgment and pedigree with intelligence. Classical education, in Hazlitt’s view, can produce a particular species of confidence: the person who has mastered the forms of greatness (Homer, Virgil, Cicero) and now assumes greatness has rubbed off. It’s a warning about secondhand minds, about being overawed by canonical prestige until your own perceptions shrink.

Calling it a “narrow escape” sharpens the subtext: the danger is not ignorance but indoctrination into tasteful conformity. Hazlitt’s intent is cultural, not merely pedagogical. He’s poking at a ruling class that hides behind ancient texts to justify present power, and he’s reminding the reader that education can be an instrument of domestication. The wit works because it treats the supposedly elevating tradition as a hazard, and independence of mind as the rare, lucky outcome.