"It takes a certain courage and a certain greatness to be truly base"
About this Quote
Paradox sharpens the words: to be truly base requires the very qualities often praised as virtues. Courage and greatness appear as morally neutral forces, capable of fueling both noble sacrifice and ignoble resolve. Baseness, when complete, is not mere pettiness or casual vice; it demands a deliberate, disciplined betrayal of conscience, a steady will to cross thresholds others will not. Cowardice dithers at the edge of wrongdoing; true depravity strides across.
Jean Anouilh often stages such collisions of values, showing how purity and compromise contend in the same person. Writing in wartime France and its aftermath, he wrestled with the pressure to accommodate necessity, the gray zones of collaboration, the cost of resistance. In Antigone, Creon speaks the language of practicality, insisting that governing requires dirty choices. The twisted compliment that there is a kind of courage in baseness exposes an unsettling truth: power and calculation, stamina and clarity of purpose, can be harnessed to vicious ends. The grandeur here is not moral greatness but magnitude of will.
The line resists comforting binaries. It implies that evil frequently succeeds not through haplessness but through conviction, organization, and the steeliness we too easily associate only with heroes. It also warns against complacency: believing that wickedness is weak makes it easier to excuse or underestimate it. To make oneself truly base is to retool virtues as instruments of harm, to repurpose bravery as remorselessness, decisiveness as cruelty, vision as domination.
At the same time, the formulation is edged with irony. By calling it a certain courage and a certain greatness, the phrase keeps moral judgment intact; the words are shaded, not surrendered. The courage of baseness is a counterfeit coin, gleaming with the shape of virtue but stamped with a different sovereign. Anouilh invites the audience to recognize the uncomfortable symmetry: that human capacities are double-edged, and that tragedy erupts when the rigor demanded by good and the rigor enabling evil mirror one another.
Jean Anouilh often stages such collisions of values, showing how purity and compromise contend in the same person. Writing in wartime France and its aftermath, he wrestled with the pressure to accommodate necessity, the gray zones of collaboration, the cost of resistance. In Antigone, Creon speaks the language of practicality, insisting that governing requires dirty choices. The twisted compliment that there is a kind of courage in baseness exposes an unsettling truth: power and calculation, stamina and clarity of purpose, can be harnessed to vicious ends. The grandeur here is not moral greatness but magnitude of will.
The line resists comforting binaries. It implies that evil frequently succeeds not through haplessness but through conviction, organization, and the steeliness we too easily associate only with heroes. It also warns against complacency: believing that wickedness is weak makes it easier to excuse or underestimate it. To make oneself truly base is to retool virtues as instruments of harm, to repurpose bravery as remorselessness, decisiveness as cruelty, vision as domination.
At the same time, the formulation is edged with irony. By calling it a certain courage and a certain greatness, the phrase keeps moral judgment intact; the words are shaded, not surrendered. The courage of baseness is a counterfeit coin, gleaming with the shape of virtue but stamped with a different sovereign. Anouilh invites the audience to recognize the uncomfortable symmetry: that human capacities are double-edged, and that tragedy erupts when the rigor demanded by good and the rigor enabling evil mirror one another.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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