Education Quote by William Ralph Inge

A cleric’s compliment that lands like a warning: Inge marvels not at how easy people are to rule, but at how cheaply consent can be purchased when power speaks in the electorate’s own idiom. “With how little wisdom” is the jab; “when that little wisdom is its own” is the mechanism. Government doesn’t need philosophers-kings if it can borrow the public’s self-image and hand it back as policy.

The line works because it refuses the usual moral binary of tyrant and victim. Inge isn’t saying the masses are simply duped; he’s pointing to a subtler collaboration. People will tolerate thin reasoning, shallow slogans, even meager justice, provided the story feels like it originated inside them: their prejudices dignified as “common sense,” their fears translated into “pragmatism,” their impulses laundered into “tradition.” The “astonishing” part is how little intellectual or ethical substance is required when the rhetoric flatters ownership. Self-recognition substitutes for truth.

Context matters. Inge, the so-called “Gloomy Dean” of St. Paul’s, wrote amid Britain’s early-20th-century churn: mass politics, expanding suffrage, propaganda refined by modern media, the aftershocks of war, and anxiety about democracy’s susceptibility to emotional appeals. As a clergyman, he also understood how communities police themselves: doctrine sticks best when it feels like conscience.

The quote’s intent is diagnostic, not merely cynical. It’s a test for any civic moment: are we being governed by wisdom, or by our preference to hear our own thoughts echoed back with official authority?