Education Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes doesn’t flatter his reader; he corners them. The line is a small trap disguised as anthropology: people will concede “witty,” “eloquent,” “learned” because those are visible currencies, socially measurable and safely external. Wisdom is different. It’s the one accolade that, if you admit someone else has more of it, threatens your right to steer your own life. So we cling to it as a kind of private sovereignty.

The sentence works because it’s built like a courtroom concession. Hobbes grants you the reasonable-sounding admission that others can outperform you in public skills, then pivots on “yet” to expose the stubborn vanity underneath. “Hardly believe” is doing heavy lifting: not “will not say,” but “will not believe.” This isn’t mere posturing; it’s cognitive self-defense. Wisdom, in Hobbes’s framing, becomes the last territory where the ego can’t tolerate occupation.

Context matters. Leviathan is a book about why order is so hard and why authority gets invented. If each person trusts their own judgment above all, disagreement isn’t a glitch; it’s the default setting. Multiply that by fear, scarcity, and pride and you get a society primed for conflict, then eager to outsource decision-making to a sovereign powerful enough to end the argument.

The subtext is almost modern: everyone thinks they’re the sensible one in the group chat. Hobbes isn’t joking, but he’s sly. He turns a common self-image into a political diagnosis: the hunger to be “wise” is less a virtue than a combustible fuel, and any stable state has to be built with that vanity in mind.