Art & Creativity Quote by Catherine the Great

The line lands like a jeweled dagger: elegant, gleaming, and meant to cut. Catherine is performing a kind of sovereign candor, admitting that her legitimacy depends not just on armies and alliances, but on controlling who gets to narrate her rule. “Write me off” isn’t just about disapproval; it’s about being dismissed as an impostor, a foreigner, a usurper. For a monarch who arrived in Russia as a German princess and seized power in a coup, public literacy becomes a threat category.

The subtext is political anthropology, delivered as a quip. Catherine is clocking a blunt reality: a largely illiterate peasantry is easier to manage because it can’t easily compare proclamations to outcomes, rumors to records, myth to policy. Reading is agency. It creates publics, not just subjects. In the 18th century, that shift is dynamite. Pamphlets, letters, and satire are the infrastructure of dissent long before “mass media” exists as a concept.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Catherine styled herself an Enlightenment ruler, corresponded with Voltaire, and flirted with reform. Yet after Pugachev’s Rebellion exposed how combustible the empire was, her appetite for liberalization narrowed. The quote captures that tension: the enlightened autocrat who loves ideas, so long as they don’t circulate too widely.

It also works as propaganda in reverse. By airing the fear, she signals power: she can afford to joke about the very thing that could unmake her. The punchline is a confession, but also a flex.