"He's very clever, but sometimes his brains go to his head"
About this Quote
A compliment that arrives with a pin already in it, Margot Asquith’s line turns “clever” into a social liability. “He’s very clever” opens like polite approval, the kind of sentence you can say at a dinner table without spilling anyone’s sherry. Then she twists the knife: “sometimes his brains go to his head.” The joke hinges on a near-tautology - brains are in your head - but that literal fact becomes the accusation. Intelligence, she implies, isn’t the problem; self-importance is. The man isn’t just smart, he’s swollen with it.
Asquith wrote from inside a world where wit was both currency and weapon: Edwardian high society, political salons, the performance of refinement. In that setting, being “clever” could read as charm or as threat, depending on whether it came packaged with humility. Her phrasing is doing class work. “Brains” suggests a kind of raw mental equipment, almost mechanical; “head” means ego, status, the seat of vanity. She separates capacity from character and then implies the mismatch: his intellect doesn’t translate into judgment, tact, or self-knowledge.
The specific intent feels social, not philosophical: a warning disguised as banter. Don’t be dazzled; watch how he uses his gifts. The subtext is also gendered in the era’s typical way: a woman’s sanctioned power often lived in observation and language, the ability to puncture a man’s self-myth with a single sentence. Asquith’s wit works because it’s light enough to pass as manners and sharp enough to land as critique.
Asquith wrote from inside a world where wit was both currency and weapon: Edwardian high society, political salons, the performance of refinement. In that setting, being “clever” could read as charm or as threat, depending on whether it came packaged with humility. Her phrasing is doing class work. “Brains” suggests a kind of raw mental equipment, almost mechanical; “head” means ego, status, the seat of vanity. She separates capacity from character and then implies the mismatch: his intellect doesn’t translate into judgment, tact, or self-knowledge.
The specific intent feels social, not philosophical: a warning disguised as banter. Don’t be dazzled; watch how he uses his gifts. The subtext is also gendered in the era’s typical way: a woman’s sanctioned power often lived in observation and language, the ability to puncture a man’s self-myth with a single sentence. Asquith’s wit works because it’s light enough to pass as manners and sharp enough to land as critique.
Quote Details
| Topic | Humility |
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