Wit & Attitude Quote by Louise Bogan

Evil rarely arrives with a cape; it shows up with paperwork, slogans, and a vacancy behind the eyes. Louise Bogan’s line compresses that bleak observation into a chiasmus that feels like a snapped twig: “Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.” The first sentence sounds like moral psychology, almost clinical. The second fractures it, as if Bogan can’t decide whether ignorance trails malice or whether malice is simply ignorance with permission.

The genius is in the self-correction. “Or” doesn’t clarify; it destabilizes. Bogan makes causality slippery on purpose, refusing the comforting idea that evil is masterminded by rare monsters. If stupidity is the escort, evil becomes ordinary, scalable. If evil is the escort, stupidity becomes complicit, not innocent. Either way, nobody gets off on a technicality.

As a poet writing through the first half of the 20th century, Bogan lived in the long shadow of mass politics and mass violence, when atrocity was often administered by the unexceptional: clerks, neighbors, polite people repeating what they’d been told. The quote carries that era’s dread without naming it. It’s also a jab at the romantic temptation to dignify evil as sophisticated, alluring, “deep.” Bogan won’t allow it. Her syntax is blunt, her rhythm curt, her final comma a little shrug of disgust.

The subtext lands like a warning: don’t underestimate the banal. Don’t assume intelligence is a firewall against cruelty, or that ignorance is harmless. The partnership is the point.