Wisdom Quote by William Watson

“Hate and mistrust are the children of blindness” lands like a moral axiom, but it’s doing something sharper than generic uplift. The sentence builds a miniature family tree in eight words: blindness begets, hate and mistrust are born. That metaphor quietly shifts responsibility. If hate is a “child,” it’s not an innate destiny or a heroic conviction; it’s a dependent, learned outcome. The line pressures the reader to look upstream at the conditions that produce social poison rather than arguing about the poison itself.

Watson’s choice of “blindness” is doing double-duty. It suggests ignorance, willful refusal to see, and the kind of narrowed perception that comes from fear or habit. Blindness isn’t framed as evil; it’s framed as absence. That’s the subtextual move: hate isn’t granted the glamour of ideology. It’s presented as what fills the vacuum when vision fails - when you can’t (or won’t) perceive another person’s reality, complexity, or humanity. Mistrust pairs with hate as its more “respectable” sibling: the emotion that can pass as prudence, patriotism, or common sense while still feeding the same cycle.

Contextually, Watson is often associated with late Victorian/Edwardian moral seriousness and public-minded verse, a period anxious about class conflict, empire, and rapid social change. In that climate, “blindness” reads as a warning about the costs of insulated certainty - the kind that lets stereotypes masquerade as knowledge. The line works because it diagnoses prejudice as a failure of perception, implying the cure is not punishment but seeing: contact, education, imagination, and the humility to admit what you don’t know.