Politics & Power Quote by Frederic Raphael

Raphael’s line lands like a cocktail-party Molotov: it borrows Oscar Wilde’s dandified authority to deliver an insult that’s too sharp to sound merely cranky. The “should have said” is the first tell. Raphael isn’t just quoting Wilde; he’s ventriloquizing him, laundering a contemporary grievance through a patron saint of epigrammatic contempt. It’s an act of cultural positioning: if Wilde is the wit, Raphael gets to be the heir.

The joke’s engine is the verb “emigrate.” Bad ideas aren’t invented in America here; they’re refugees, rejected elsewhere, crossing the Atlantic for opportunity. That frames the U.S. as both dumping ground and amplifier, a place where marginal notions can acquire legitimacy simply by being credentialed. “Become university courses” is the punchline because it weaponizes academia’s soft power: the syllabus as a border checkpoint that turns fads into fields. A “course” sounds harmless, even nerdy, yet Raphael uses it as a stamp of institutional approval, implying that universities don’t just teach culture; they certify it.

The subtext is a familiar transatlantic sneer: European sophistication versus American earnestness and scale. But Raphael also slips in a broader anxiety about modern knowledge economies, where novelty can outrun rigor and where ideological fashion is rewarded with platforms. As a screenwriter, he’s fluent in the economy of the one-liner: compress a whole worldview into a single reversal, then let the audience supply the targets - “theory,” “studies,” “trends” - depending on what they already distrust. That’s why it works: it recruits your cynicism and hands it an elegant accent.