Humor & Life Quote by W. C. Fields

Fields turns moral progress into a bar joke with a knife edge. The first line borrows the self-congratulatory language of enlightenment: "free of all prejudices" is how decent people advertise their decency, a badge of modern tolerance before tolerance was branding. Then he detonates it with the deadpan reversal: "I hate every one equally". The punchline works because it exposes a loophole in virtue-signaling logic. If prejudice is condemned for being unequal, then equal-opportunity contempt can masquerade as fairness.

The intent is classic Fields: misanthropy as performance, cynicism as a kind of honesty. His persona was the professional sourpuss, the man allergic to sentiment and suspicious of human motives. In that world, "equality" isn't a moral achievement; it's a bureaucratic standard applied to something ugly. He uses the language of social virtue to defend a vice, and that inversion is the whole comic engine.

Subtextually, the line needles both the bigot and the sanctimonious anti-bigot. It implies that some people don't renounce prejudice so much as they swap it for a cleaner, more socially acceptable disdain. Everyone gets flattened to "every one" - no groups, no nuance, just a species-level indictment.

Context matters: Fields worked in an era when public etiquette and private bias coexisted comfortably. His joke doesn’t redeem hatred; it ridicules the human talent for dressing it up. The laugh comes with an uncomfortable recognition: we like our cruelties to sound principled.