Science Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Prejudice, for Lichtenberg, isn’t just a moral failure; it’s labor-saving machinery. Calling prejudices “mechanical instincts” turns what people like to romanticize as conviction into something closer to habit physics: a set of automatic routines that keep the mind from having to lift. The sting is in “without any effort.” He’s diagnosing how bias functions as cognitive automation, letting us act with the confidence of principle while skipping the expensive part: thinking.

The line’s real target is willpower theater. “Resolving to do them” suggests that even when reason might eventually lead you to a decision, the path is long, uncertain, and psychologically taxing. Prejudice collapses that process into a reflex. It’s not merely that prejudices distort judgment; they provide prepackaged decisions, especially for actions that require justification, courage, or moral compromise. If you already “know” who is lazy, dangerous, inferior, untrustworthy, you don’t have to argue yourself into exclusion, cruelty, or indifference. The prejudice does the arguing for you.

Context matters: Lichtenberg is an Enlightenment-era scientist with a satirist’s scalpel, writing in a period that worshiped reason but was riddled with inherited hierarchies. His insight is uncomfortably modern: our brains love defaults. Prejudice persists not because it’s persuasive, but because it’s efficient. The quote works because it strips bias of its grand narratives and frames it as a convenience technology - an internal bureaucracy stamping “approved” on choices we’d rather not examine.