Education Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Safety, here, is a wickedly practical word: Colton isn’t praising curiosity so much as warning you about the social explosives hidden in “helpful” advice. To learn from an enemy costs little ego and even less political capital. You can listen, extract what’s useful, and keep your conclusions private. An adversary has no expectations of deference, no sentimental claim on your loyalty, and no right to feel betrayed by your skepticism. The exchange is transactional; that’s why it’s “safe.”

“Instruct,” though, is framed as a venture, a risk taken into intimate territory. Colton knows that teaching isn’t just transferring information; it’s asserting status. To instruct a friend is to imply they’re lacking, and friendship runs on a fragile economy of mutual respect and face-saving. Advice can read as superiority, correction as contempt, guidance as control. The subtext is almost anthropological: the closer the relationship, the more easily truth becomes insult.

Colton’s era helps explain the edge. Writing in a Britain of sharp class boundaries, moralizing pamphlets, and anxious respectability, he’d seen how “improvement” rhetoric often doubled as social disciplining. His line slices through the pieties of benevolence: learning is humble, teaching is power. The aphorism lands because it flips our instinct to trust friends and distrust enemies, then replaces it with a colder rule about incentives. Enemies can only harm you if you expose yourself; friends can wound you while believing they’re doing you a favor.