Daily Inspiration Quote by Oscar Wilde

Wilde lands the punch with a genteel verb: "keeps us in touch". It sounds like civic hygiene, the press as public service. Then he pivots, politely vicious, to what we are being kept in touch with: "the ignorance of the community". The line works because it masquerades as a compliment to journalism’s democratic reach while indicting its appetite for the loudest, least-informed voices. In Wilde’s hands, "opinions" are not wisdom in circulation; they’re cheap currency, minted by certainty rather than knowledge.

The intent is less anti-press than anti-phoniness. Wilde distrusts any institution that confuses representation with merit. Journalism, especially in the late Victorian boom of mass-circulation papers, didn’t just report the public; it increasingly manufactured "the public" as a marketable personality - nosy, aggrieved, easily stirred. By elevating the uneducated as a kind of moral ballast, the press flatters readers with proximity: your view counts because it exists. Wilde’s jab is that this is not empowerment but a feedback loop, ignorance laundered into legitimacy through repetition and print.

Subtextually, he’s also skewering a culture that treats attention as truth. Journalism’s supposed virtue - giving voice - becomes, under commercial pressure, a mechanism for turning noise into consensus. Wilde, the consummate aesthetic aristocrat and social satirist, isn’t calling for elitist silence so much as demanding discrimination: not censorship, but taste, editorial judgment, the courage to say some opinions are merely uninformed and should not steer the ship.