"It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians"
About this Quote
Ibsen lands the punchline with a moral halo and a stink bomb. He opens by sounding like a principled humanist - "inexcusable" is the language of ethical certainty - then swerves into a proposal so neatly vicious it exposes the politics hiding inside polite compassion. The joke is not that Ibsen literally wants to vivisect journalists and politicians; its sharper aim is to ask why some forms of suffering reliably trigger outrage while other forms of harm get laundered into "necessity", "progress", or "public service."
The target list is telling. Journalists and politicians are the professional talkers, the managers of narrative and power. By volunteering them as experimental material, Ibsen flips the usual hierarchy: the people who shape public consent suddenly become the bodies on the table. It's revenge fantasy, sure, but it's also a diagnosis. If society insists on sacrifice for knowledge or for the state, the people most insulated from consequences should be first in line. The barb bites because it imagines accountability as physical vulnerability.
Context matters. Ibsen wrote in an era enthralled by modern science and rattled by its methods, when debates about vivisection were proxies for bigger anxieties: industrialization, the cold authority of experts, the feeling that "progress" could be ruthless. As a dramatist-poet who specialized in respectable hypocrisy, Ibsen uses cruelty as a spotlight. The line performs what his plays do: it forces the comfortable to feel, briefly, what it means to be powerless under someone else's rationale.
The target list is telling. Journalists and politicians are the professional talkers, the managers of narrative and power. By volunteering them as experimental material, Ibsen flips the usual hierarchy: the people who shape public consent suddenly become the bodies on the table. It's revenge fantasy, sure, but it's also a diagnosis. If society insists on sacrifice for knowledge or for the state, the people most insulated from consequences should be first in line. The barb bites because it imagines accountability as physical vulnerability.
Context matters. Ibsen wrote in an era enthralled by modern science and rattled by its methods, when debates about vivisection were proxies for bigger anxieties: industrialization, the cold authority of experts, the feeling that "progress" could be ruthless. As a dramatist-poet who specialized in respectable hypocrisy, Ibsen uses cruelty as a spotlight. The line performs what his plays do: it forces the comfortable to feel, briefly, what it means to be powerless under someone else's rationale.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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