War & Peace Quote by Alice Duer Miller

Contempt always wants to pass as strength: the curled lip, the effortless dismissal, the posture of someone too clear-eyed to be fooled. Alice Duer Miller punctures that performance by reclassifying contempt as a tool of the powerless, not the powerful. The word "weapon" is doing sly work here. A weapon is what you reach for when you can't win through persuasion, intimacy, or competence. Contempt doesn’t solve the problem in front of you; it makes the other person smaller so you can feel bigger without changing anything.

Her second clause sharpens the diagnosis into something almost psychoanalytic, especially for a poet writing in an era when modern psychology was seeping into public life. Contempt isn’t just aggression outward; it’s self-protection inward. "Despised and unwanted feelings" suggests vulnerability that cannot be admitted - envy, fear, dependence, desire, grief. The move is projection with a moral alibi: if I can label you ridiculous, I don't have to face what you awaken in me. Contempt becomes a kind of emotional quarantine.

The subtext is both ethical and political. In Miller's lifetime - Progressive Era reforms, suffrage battles, class anxieties, a world war - contempt was a fashionable pose in public argument: a way to foreclose debate by sneering at the supposedly inferior. Miller frames that sneer as confession. If contempt is a defense, it reveals the tender spot it tries to hide. The line lands because it flips the social meaning of contempt from superiority to insecurity, making the contemptuous reader suddenly feel seen.