Daily Inspiration Quote by Albert J. Nock

Nock’s line works because it’s an insult that tries to dodge being an insult. He opens by admitting the charge in its most radioactive form - “disliked Jews” - then snaps the premise sideways: the problem isn’t Jews, he claims, it’s “folks.” That pivot is classic Nockian misanthropy dressed up as moral clarification. He wants credit for being too principled to hate a group qua group; his contempt is, he implies, democratically distributed.

The subtext is slipperier. By accepting the accusation before qualifying it, Nock gets to perform candor while keeping the sting. “Not at all because they are Jews” reads like an ethical disclaimer, but it also treats anti-Jewish prejudice as a misunderstanding of his more “refined” dislike. It’s a rhetorical laundering: he converts a specific bigotry into a general philosophy and invites the reader to see him as above tribal hatreds.

Context matters: Nock wrote in an era when genteel anti-Semitism circulated comfortably in elite conversation, and when the pose of the detached intellectual - allergic to mass society, suspicious of “the people,” weary of modern democracy - could be framed as sophistication rather than social failure. His punchline leans on that posture. “Folks” is doing a lot of work: it’s an everyman word used to express an anti-everyman worldview.

The quote lands as wit, but its mechanism is evasion. It asks you to admire the breadth of his disdain instead of scrutinizing the particular charge that prompted it.