Life & Wisdom Quote by Wyndham Lewis

Comfort, in Wyndham Lewis's hands, is never the soft furniture of good manners; it's the hard chair of self-preservation. "In the long run" is the tell. Rudeness isn't framed as a tantrum or a lapse but as a strategy: a way to avoid the exhausting upkeep of politeness, with its rituals of deference, false agreement, and social lubrication. Lewis casts courtesy as a kind of slow debt, compounded over time, while bluntness pays upfront and walks away clean.

The line carries Lewis's signature antagonism toward the cozy hypocrisies of bourgeois culture. Politeness, in this worldview, is less moral virtue than social technology: it keeps rooms calm, hierarchies intact, and unpleasant truths unspoken. To choose rudeness is to opt out of the performance, even if it makes you unpopular. There's a bracing honesty in admitting that what passes for virtue can be a form of labor, and that some people refuse the job.

The subtext is also a confession of temperament. Lewis implies he's wired to chafe against consensus, and he'd rather own the friction than constantly edit himself into acceptability. It aligns with the modernist impulse to smash surfaces and reveal structure: the idea that clarity is worth offense, that social harmony is sometimes just well-managed denial.

Taken in context of Lewis's combative public persona and polemical writing, it's not merely an excuse to be abrasive. It's a critique of civility as camouflage - and a wager that authenticity, even in its uglier register, is the only sustainable posture.