Life & Wisdom Quote by Evelyn Waugh

The joke lands like a bureaucratic memo written by someone who secretly loathes the public. Waugh’s line adopts the smug, managerial cadence of censorship while pretending it’s just practical policy: if you can’t eradicate “literature” domestically, at least control the border. The word choice is the tell. “Stamp out” belongs to vermin control and industrial cleanup, not art. Literature is framed as contamination, an imported pest, something that spreads if you don’t quarantine it.

Waugh is needling a peculiarly modern authoritarian impulse: the fantasy that culture can be managed the way you manage tariffs. The line’s structure is classic comic deflation. It starts with an impossibly grand ambition (wipe out literature) then retreats to an incremental consolation prize (ban foreign books), exposing the petty, procedural nature of the censor’s mind. That retreat is the subtext: repression rarely announces itself as bonfires; it arrives as “reasonable” restrictions, customs checks, licensing boards, and the comforting language of public order.

Context matters because Waugh was a Catholic conservative with a deep distrust of mass society, yet also an artist whose livelihood depended on the very thing being targeted. That tension sharpens the satire. He’s not offering an activist slogan; he’s ventriloquizing the voice of a state that treats imagination as contraband. The barb is aimed at moral panics, nationalist gatekeeping, and the anxious belief that outsiders’ ideas are what corrupt a nation. Waugh’s wit doesn’t argue against censorship so much as make it look ridiculous: the censor as a small man with big fantasies and a stamp.