Daily Inspiration Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde turns civility into a weapon: if arguments are "extremely vulgar", it is not because conflict is inherently indecent, but because the kind of society that prides itself on refinement has made disagreement inadmissible. The joke lands by treating unanimity as a social accessory, as if opinion were part of the dress code. "Good society" becomes a closed system where the correct view is less a conviction than a credential.

The line’s bite is in its double insult. On the surface, it flatters the elite: of course they all agree; of course they’re tasteful. Underneath, it calls them intellectually embalmed. If everyone holds "exactly the same opinion", then conversation is merely choreography, and "arguments" are vulgar the way honest sweat is vulgar in a drawing room. Wilde isn’t just mocking debate; he’s mocking the pretense that consensus equals correctness, or that politeness equals morality.

Context matters: late-Victorian London was obsessed with propriety, reputation, and the rituals of class, while also quietly panicking about modernity, politics, and shifting sexual and social norms. Wilde made a career of placing a mirror in front of that anxiety and polishing it until it became cruel. The epigram’s precision is its politics: it exposes how social groups enforce conformity by aestheticizing it. Disagreement becomes bad manners; dissent becomes self-banishment. Wilde’s wit doesn’t rescue society from hypocrisy so much as spotlight how comfortably hypocrisy can be upholstered.