Wit & Attitude Quote by Remy de Gourmont

The line lands like a smirk sharpened into a thesis: our defining human talent isn’t reason, it’s the ability to manufacture nonsense with intention. Remy de Gourmont, a fin-de-siecle novelist and critic, writes from a moment when “progress” was practically a civic religion in Europe, all electricity and empire and self-congratulation. His jab works because it flips the era’s bragging rights. If modernity prides itself on invention, he suggests the most scalable product we’ve perfected is error.

The phrasing is doing quiet work. “Inventor” implies creativity, craft, even pride; stupidity becomes not a mere absence of intelligence but a designed object, something assembled, improved, patented, distributed. That’s the subtext: human beings don’t just make mistakes; we build systems that protect mistakes from correction. We don’t simply fail to think; we engineer reasons not to think, then decorate them with tradition, ideology, etiquette, or “common sense.”

As a novelist, de Gourmont understands that stupidity is rarely pure ignorance. It’s often narrative: the convenient story, the identity-saving explanation, the social script that keeps the group intact. His cynicism isn’t misanthropy for sport; it’s a critique of how culture metabolizes complexity into comforting simplifications. In the shadow of an anxious, nationalistic Europe edging toward catastrophe, the line reads less like a quip and more like a warning: when stupidity is invented, it can be mass-produced, and it rarely stays harmless.