Daily Inspiration Quote by Logan Pearsall Smith

The line lands like a reprimand aimed at the well-meaning: innocence isn’t neutral, it’s enabling. Smith’s sting is in the reversal. We like to think Evil thrives among cynics, schemers, and the visibly corrupt. He argues it blooms in the soft soil of moral complacency - among people so committed to seeing goodness, so allergic to suspicion, that they become ideal hosts for exploitation.

“Think no evil” isn’t just personal optimism; it’s a social posture. It’s the etiquette that treats skepticism as rude, the civic habit of trusting institutions by default, the private impulse to explain away warning signs because confronting them would rupture comfort or community. Smith’s choice of “monstrously” suggests scale and grotesquerie: not petty wrongdoing, but systems of harm that grow huge precisely because no one wants to name them early, when naming might still matter. Evil becomes “monstrous” when it has time, cover, and silence.

As a critic formed in the late Victorian and early modern eras - when respectability, propriety, and “good breeding” often served as shields for hypocrisy - Smith is targeting the moral theater of his class as much as any abstract villain. The subtext is that evil doesn’t need universal complicity; it needs a reliable minority of people committed to not noticing. The quote works because it indicts a flattering self-image (the decent, trusting person) and replaces it with a harsher responsibility: vigilance isn’t paranoia, it’s a civic duty.