Politics & Power Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Waugh lobs this line like a cocktail glass at the wall: elegant, cutting, and meant to shatter something polite. Calling quotation a "national vice" turns a harmless literary habit into a moral failing, the way a satirist frames manners as pathology. The phrase "the dying world I come from" is the real blade. He isn't mourning a civilization; he's indicting it as a decadent class culture living on fumes, still performing sophistication even as its authority collapses.

The specific intent is to puncture the self-satisfied English reflex of borrowing other people's words as social currency. Quotation, in Waugh's telling, is not admiration but camouflage: a way to sound educated without risking a thought of your own, a way to signal club membership through shared references. It's also a sly jab at the British ruling class's obsession with tradition, where the past is endlessly recycled to legitimize the present. If you can summon the right line of Latin or Pope at the right moment, you don't need to justify your politics, your privilege, or your taste.

Contextually, Waugh is writing from the aftershock of modernity: two world wars, crumbling empire, and the slow liquidation of the old social order that his novels both fetishize and flay. His irony is doubled because he himself is a virtuoso quoter, steeped in Catholic and classical allusion. That self-implication is the subtext: the vice is his, too. The line performs the very condition it condemns, which is exactly why it lands.