Wit & Attitude Quote by Wilkie Collins

A Victorian novelist watching modernity rev its engines, Collins doesn’t bother with the usual anxieties about sin or decadence. He goes straight for the punchline: the fools are doing great. The bite of the line is in its mock-scientific posture - “one important phenomenon,” “presented by modern society” - as if he’s calmly filing an objective report. Then he drops the scandalous finding: prosperity, not progress, is the headline, and it’s being enjoyed by the least deserving cast.

The subtext is less “people are stupid” than “systems now reward stupidity.” Collins is writing in a century of expanding markets, mass newspapers, booming speculation, and a growing middle class eager for status. In that swirl, intelligence and virtue don’t necessarily convert into money or power; visibility does. Confidence does. The ability to sell a story about yourself does. “Fools” here aren’t only the ignorant - they’re the glib, the credulous, the opportunists who thrive when social life becomes a marketplace.

The phrasing “I have always maintained” gives it the tone of a long-simmering grievance, the kind formed by watching reputations rise for reasons that have nothing to do with merit. Coming from a novelist who trafficked in sensation, deception, and social performance, it’s also a sly admission: modern society is a great plot machine, and its most successful characters aren’t the wise but the shameless. Collins isn’t mourning the end of order; he’s diagnosing a new order with a darkly comic clarity.