Daily Inspiration Quote by Abba Eban

"His ignorance is encyclopedic" is the kind of insult that works because it flatters the target with the very thing it’s denying. Abba Eban, a diplomat famous for patrician precision, weaponizes a word associated with authority and learning and bolts it onto its opposite. The snap is in the contradiction: ignorance isn’t usually imagined as something you can catalog, cross-reference, and shelve. By calling it encyclopedic, Eban implies not a lack but an abundance, a disciplined, almost scholarly commitment to being wrong.

The specific intent is surgical delegitimization. This isn’t "he’s uninformed". It’s "he is comprehensively, systemically uninformed, across categories". The line paints ignorance as a completed project: researched, organized, internally consistent. That matters in political life, where the most dangerous actors aren’t always the clueless ones but the confidently misinformed ones, the people with ready-made answers and no curiosity.

Subtext: the speaker is also scoring status. Only someone comfortable with language and institutions gets to land an insult like this without sounding petty. It signals membership in an elite rhetorical class - the world of briefs, cables, and parliamentary jousting - where you can’t call someone an idiot, but you can make their intellectual reputation bleed in one elegant sentence.

Contextually, Eban came out of an era when diplomacy was performed as much in phrasing as in policy. In that setting, wit isn’t decoration; it’s a tool for marking credibility, drawing lines between competence and charlatanry, and reminding listeners that ignorance can be expansive enough to look, from a distance, like expertise.