Daily Inspiration Quote by Denis Diderot

Diderot’s line is a grenade lobbed at polite society, then calmly footnoted. “It is not human nature we should accuse” rejects the comforting old theology that people are rotten at the core and therefore deserve whatever hierarchy, punishment, or “discipline” their betters prescribe. He doesn’t let humans off the hook so much as he relocates guilt from the soul to the social script: “despicable conventions” aren’t neutral customs; they’re engineered habits that turn ordinary impulses into vice, shame, and obedience.

The phrasing matters. “Accuse” implies a trial, a moral court where “human nature” is the defendant. Diderot is cross-examining the prosecutor: who benefits from the verdict that people are innately corrupt? “Pervert” is even sharper. Convention doesn’t merely restrain; it twists. Desire becomes hypocrisy, curiosity becomes heresy, affection becomes property. The target is an ancien regime worldview where church, monarchy, and inherited rank claim legitimacy by presenting themselves as the antidote to humanity’s alleged depravity.

Context is Enlightenment anticlericalism and the editor’s sensibility: Diderot, architect of the Encyclopedie, trusted knowledge to demystify power. This sentence reads like an editorial ethic as much as a philosophy: don’t moralize the individual when the system is designing the outcomes. It’s an early argument for what we’d now call structural critique, but with a distinctly 18th-century bite: the scandal isn’t that people are flawed; it’s that “conventions” make that flaw profitable, then blame us for it.