Wit & Attitude Quote by Jean Giraudoux

Giraudoux flips the expected moral of schooling with a sneer: education, the supposed elevator out of animal life, can actually drag us below it. “More stupid than the brutes” isn’t anti-learning so much as anti-prestige. He’s targeting the cultivated person who mistakes credentials for perception, and who learns just enough “wisdom” to stop listening.

The line works because “wisdom” is treated like a physical obstruction. Instead of opening the senses, it plugs them. That image nails a psychological truth: once you’ve internalized the approved frameworks of your time - the canon, the ideology, the polite vocabulary - your attention gets pre-sorted. You stop hearing “a thousand voices” not because they’re silent, but because you’ve been trained to filter them out as irrelevant, vulgar, irrational, or inconvenient. The brutes, by contrast, at least respond to the raw signal. Their ignorance doesn’t come with prepackaged contempt.

Context matters. Giraudoux writes between wars, in a Europe drowning in expert certainty: technocrats, nationalists, propagandists, and cultured elites all selling coherent stories about progress, destiny, order. The catastrophe of the early 20th century didn’t arrive with a lack of education; it arrived with highly educated people marshaling their intelligence in service of disastrous scripts. As a dramatist, Giraudoux is also defending the theater’s messy, many-voiced reality against the tidy moral lessons institutions prefer. His cynicism isn’t that learning is useless; it’s that “wisdom” can become a form of deafness dressed up as refinement.