Parenting & Family Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line lands like a moral verdict dressed as plain sense: prejudice isn’t an instinct, it’s a production. By calling it “the child of ignorance,” he turns bias into something born, raised, and therefore preventable. The metaphor matters. A “child” implies lineage and environment; ignorance isn’t just a lack of information, it’s a condition that reproduces itself through habit, hearsay, and social insulation. Prejudice, in this framing, isn’t merely wrong, it’s secondhand.

As a critic writing in the afterglow of the French Revolution and amid Britain’s own political tremors, Hazlitt was obsessed with how opinion gets manufactured - by class interest, by patriotic mythmaking, by the comforting stories societies tell themselves. The sentence carries his signature impatience with received wisdom: if you’re clinging to prejudice, you’re confessing you haven’t looked closely enough. It’s a jab at complacency as much as cruelty.

The subtext is strategically optimistic. If prejudice is a “child,” it can be unlearned, starved of attention, or educated out of existence. Hazlitt is smuggling in an Enlightenment faith that clearer seeing can make people better - but with the edge of a realist who knows ignorance is not accidental. It’s cultivated because it’s useful: it keeps hierarchies stable, excuses violence, and saves people from the hard work of revising their worldview. The sentence works because it sounds like a simple proverb while accusing an entire culture of intellectual laziness.