Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Brodsky

Snobbery usually struts around as confidence: impeccable taste, the right references, the faint curl of the lip. Brodsky flips it and shows the seam. For him, snobbery isn’t a surplus of self-esteem but a shortage of hope - a defensive posture taken when the world feels too chaotic, too indifferent, too uncontrollable. If you can rank people, you can pretend the ranking system itself is stable. The sneer becomes a handrail.

The line works because it moralizes without preaching. “Only” is the knife: it shrinks the grand theater of superiority into something small, almost pitiable. And “despair” drags the emotion out from under the etiquette. Snobbery isn’t just bad manners; it’s a spiritual symptom, a coping mechanism for the fear of being ordinary, unseen, unchosen. The snob looks down partly to avoid looking inward.

Brodsky’s context matters. A poet shaped by Soviet coercion, exile, and the constant pressure of ideological categorization would have had special sensitivity to hierarchies - and to the human impulse to build private ones when public life is degrading. In that light, snobbery reads as a bourgeois substitute for political power: if you can’t control history, you can at least control taste.

Subtextually, it’s also a warning to artists and intellectuals, Brodsky’s own tribe. Cultural distinction can be a serious pursuit; it can also be despair dressed as discernment, using refinement as a barricade against vulnerability.