Life & Wisdom Quote by W. H. Auden

Auden’s line is a scalpel aimed at moral asymmetry: virtue has to do the cognitive labor of understanding harm, while harm survives by shrinking the mind. “Good can imagine Evil” isn’t sentimental; it’s tactical. Decent people must anticipate betrayal, cruelty, propaganda, the small conveniences that make violence feel normal. Goodness, in Auden’s framing, requires moral imagination precisely because it lives in a world where innocence is not a defense.

The sting is in the second clause. “Evil cannot imagine Good” suggests not just malice but a failure of perception. Evil, here, is not a grand satanic force; it’s a cramped worldview that treats altruism as a con, mercy as weakness, solidarity as a mask for self-interest. That misreading becomes a weapon: if you can’t picture genuine decency, you can dismiss it as hypocrisy and neutralize it before it threatens you. It’s a psychological portrait of cynicism as self-protection.

Context matters: Auden wrote in the shadow of the 20th century’s mass ideologies, when entire systems depended on reclassifying compassion as naivete and conscience as “bourgeois.” The line doubles as a warning to liberals and humanists: your enemies will not meet you halfway in interpretation. It also rebukes the comforting myth that “everyone is the hero of their own story.” Some people aren’t confused protagonists; they’re committed to a logic where the very idea of good is unintelligible.