Wit & Attitude Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Lichtenberg takes aim at the cozy moral fantasy that evil is merely brutish and good is purely enlightened. He argues the opposite in a deliberately unsettling symmetry: monstrosity can be accomplished artfully, with the same “spirit and talent” we’re taught to admire in safer arenas. The line is surgical because it refuses to let competence hide behind virtue. If wickedness can be executed with panache, then talent isn’t a moral alibi; it’s an accelerant.

Then he pivots to the more corrosive claim: greatness, too, depends on a kind of numbness. The word “insensitivity” isn’t just emotional coldness; it’s selective deafness to doubts, distractions, and competing claims. To do something “great” often requires narrowing the field of vision until only the mission remains. Under ordinary social conditions we would call that narrowing “stupidity” because it looks like a failure of empathy or imagination. Lichtenberg’s sting is that history tends to reward this defect when it’s attached to success.

Context matters: Lichtenberg is an Enlightenment-era scientist and aphorist, writing in a period obsessed with reason, progress, and moral improvement. His skepticism is the point. He’s warning that the engines of achievement - ambition, focus, confidence - are ethically neutral tools. Society retrofits moral narratives after the fact, mistaking outcomes for character. The subtext: beware of admiring intensity without examining what it’s willing to ignore, and beware of condemning “stupidity” when it’s simply the socially unapproved face of the same tunnel vision we later canonize as greatness.