Creativity Quote by Richard D. James

Aphorisms about hate usually arrive dressed up as moral instruction; Richard D. James makes his point with a shrug. "Can't really despise people you don't know" reads less like a plea for empathy than a cool-eyed diagnosis of how contempt gets manufactured. The key word is "really". It concedes that we can perform despising strangers all day long, but it’s a flimsy, secondhand emotion: borrowed from headlines, gossip, group identity, or whatever ambient outrage is playing in the room.

Coming from a musician whose public persona has often been slippery, ironic, and deliberately hard to pin down, the line also works as self-defense. James has spent a career being mythologized as much as listened to. He knows the audience’s relationship to a figure on a stage (or behind a logo, or inside a rumor) isn’t intimacy; it’s projection. The quote gently indicts the fan who thinks they know the artist, and the critic who thinks they know the target.

The subtext is about distance: despising requires a story, and when you don’t have real proximity, you fill in the blanks with caricature. That’s why the sentence lands culturally now, in an era where strangers are reduced to avatars and outrage is frictionless. James isn’t absolving anyone of responsibility; he’s pointing out that contempt without contact is mostly theater. The most unsettling implication is that the emotion feels sincere precisely because it’s easy.