Life & Wisdom Quote by Euripides

Euripides isn’t praising ignorance so much as stripping intelligence of its halo. In a culture that celebrated clever speech - the courtroom flourish, the assembly zinger, the Sophist’s dazzling argument - he draws a blunt moral line: brilliance without goodness isn’t just useless, it’s dangerous. The preference for an “ignorant” good man reads like provocation, a deliberate insult to Athens’ self-image as the school of Hellas. If the city prizes mental agility above character, Euripides suggests, it’s stocking its friendships (and its politics) with loaded weapons.

The subtext is about trust. Friendship is a small-scale version of civic life: you attach your fate to someone else’s judgment. A “more clever” person who is “evil too” can weaponize insight, manipulate motives, and rationalize betrayal with style. The ignorant good man, by contrast, may lack polish, but he’s legible. His limitations make him safer; his virtue makes him dependable.

Euripides’ tragedies repeatedly expose how rhetorical brilliance can mask rot - how persuasive talk bends crowds, families, even gods toward catastrophe. Read in that context, the line functions as a rebuke to a society in love with its own intelligence. It’s also a sly reversal of status: the “ignorant” man becomes the aristocrat of ethics, while the clever villain is demoted to a social liability. The sting is that Euripides is himself a master technician of language, using artful phrasing to argue that technique alone cannot be the measure of a human being.