Politics & Power Quote by Arthur Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer compresses a whole theory of human pettiness into a line that lands like a shrug and a slap. The joke is that everyone’s contempt feels justified, and he grants that satisfaction just long enough to expose how cheaply it’s earned. “All are right” isn’t a celebration of mutual insight; it’s a bleak diagnosis of how ridicule works: you don’t need accurate knowledge of the other nation, only a usable caricature. The truth, for Schopenhauer, lives not in the particulars of any stereotype but in the mechanism that produces them.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface it sounds cosmopolitan, even fair-minded: no one is exempt, so no one gets to act innocent. Underneath, it’s misanthropy with passport stamps. Nations are just individuals scaled up, driven by vanity, insecurity, and the need to feel superior without doing the hard work of actually becoming superior. Ridicule becomes a low-cost form of cohesion: we laugh together at them, therefore we belong together.

Context matters. Schopenhauer writes in a Europe thick with rising nationalism, post-Napoleonic border anxieties, and the early modern press’s appetite for national types. His philosophy treats the will as a restless, competitive force; national mockery is the will dressed in flags, seeking relief through comparison. The line endures because it refuses the comforting story that prejudice is an error we’ll outgrow with better facts. It suggests something darker: ridicule is a social technology, and its “rightness” is precisely what makes it contagious.