Daily Inspiration Quote by Denis Diderot

Diderot is smuggling a dangerous insight in the costume of a paradox: morality doesn’t just judge wrongdoing, it ranks it by aesthetic and social scale. “Sublime” is the tell. In the 18th-century sense, the sublime is what overwhelms the mind - vast, terrifying, electrifying. Apply that to “wickedness” and you get a grim admission about spectatorship: we recoil from small-time theft not only because it’s wrong, but because it’s small. Petty crime feels like failure, need, or incompetence. Grand crime, by contrast, can masquerade as genius.

The line performs a surgical inversion of bourgeois virtue. The petty thief gets spit on because he’s close enough to us to be contemptible: he breaks the rules without transcending them. The “great criminal” earns “a kind of respect” because scale confers a counterfeit nobility. Magnitude becomes charisma. Power becomes a moral alibi, or at least a narcotic that dulls disgust.

As an editor-philosophe in the Enlightenment, Diderot knew how institutions launder violence into legitimacy. Kings, empires, and financiers could commit harms that would hang a poor man, then have it reframed as policy, strategy, or necessity. The quote isn’t praising evil so much as exposing the audience’s complicity: we’re trained to admire force, even when it’s predatory, if it arrives with spectacle and self-possession.

It lands because it’s uncomfortably contemporary. We still treat certain forms of wrongdoing as content, brand, or “legacy,” mistaking the audacity of harm for the grandeur of achievement.