Education Quote by Christopher Morley

Morley’s line has the breezy sting of a man refusing to let civilization flatter itself. Calling pugnacity a “habit” learned from “Nature” is a sly demotion of human moral exceptionalism: we aren’t uniquely fallen angels, just bright animals copying the house style of the planet. The word choice matters. “Unfair” smuggles in the language of courtroom ethics, then immediately shifts the blame to a force that can’t be subpoenaed. It’s not a pardon so much as a reframing: if you want to indict aggression, you have to indict the entire biological script that rewards it.

The subtext runs on two tracks. One is compassion edged with cynicism: moral outrage at human violence can become a kind of vanity, as if anger itself proves we’re above the mess. The other is warning. If pugnacity is learned behavior, it’s also reinforced behavior, and Morley is nudging readers to notice the everyday ecosystems that train us: competition dressed up as virtue, scarcity treated as natural law, dominance coded as strength. Nature here isn’t a serene postcard; it’s a teacher with a bruising curriculum.

Contextually, Morley wrote in a century that marketed progress while mass-producing war, propaganda, and mechanized killing. His move is to undercut the comforting narrative that brutality is a temporary glitch in an otherwise enlightened species. The irony is that he’s offering a humane gesture by way of a harsh diagnosis: to change the habit, you first have to stop pretending it’s an aberration.