Wit & Attitude Quote by Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa is diagnosing mass persuasion with the cool cruelty of someone who watched modernity invent new megaphones. The line lands because it refuses the comforting myth that good ideas naturally rise on their merits. Instead, he frames “general acceptance” as a kind of compromise with the crowd: intelligence alone is too sharp, too demanding, too alienating. To travel, it needs padding.

The key move is his loaded use of “mixed in.” He isn’t talking about a single mistake or an unfortunate simplification; he’s describing dilution as an ingredient. “Some stupidity” functions like sweetener in bitter medicine, or branding on an otherwise rigorous argument: a slogan, a superstition, a false certainty. The subtext is pessimistic but not merely snobbish. Pessoa is pointing to the way public life metabolizes ideas through habits, emotions, and status games. People don’t adopt theories; they adopt identities. Stupidity, here, is the identity-friendly part.

Context matters: early 20th-century Portugal was marked by political turbulence, the rise of mass politics, and the growing machinery of propaganda. Pessoa, a modernist with heteronyms and a taste for fragmentation, understood how the “public” is constructed and managed. His cynicism reads less like elitism than like media criticism before the term existed. He’s warning that if you want an idea to scale, you will be tempted to make it simpler, louder, more self-satisfied than it deserves to be.

It also cuts both ways: if stupidity is a delivery system, then popularity becomes suspect. What wins isn’t always what’s true; it’s what’s easy to repeat.