Wit & Attitude Quote by Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Hepburn delivers moral clarity with her usual flinty humor, collapsing glamour into common sense. She links intelligence to the capacity for remorse: to have sense is to look back on foolish actions, feel their sting, and adjust course. Refusing regret is not strength in her view but a failure of reflection, a kind of willful dullness. The quip lands because it reverses the swaggering slogan of living with no regrets and instead treats regret as evidence that the lights are on upstairs.

The distinction is not between shame and shamelessness so much as between paralysis and learning. She is not advocating self-flagellation. Regret becomes a tool, a sharp edge that trims away self-importance and invites revision of habits, choices, and character. It is a clear-eyed acknowledgment that actions have consequences for oneself and for others, and that an intelligent person can take responsibility without collapsing into despair.

That stance fits her career and persona. A New England Yankee with a taste for plain speech, she built a life out of self-discipline, reinvention, and a refusal to be coddled. After being branded box-office poison in the late 1930s, she did not posture as blameless or double down on ego; she took control of her material, returned to the stage, and used business savvy to engineer a comeback with The Philadelphia Story. The point is not that success erases mistakes, but that honest appraisal of missteps fuels better choices.

There is also an ethical barb. To feel no regret is to disregard the harm caused by one’s own stupidity, which implies a deficit of empathy as well as intellect. Hepburn’s independence never meant a license to be thoughtless. In elevating regret to a sign of sense, she offers a paradoxically liberating standard: call your own bluff, admit the dumb thing, learn, and move on. The bite of her line, "maybe you’re stupid", is less insult than invitation to grow up.