Happiness Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Laughter, for Hobbes, isn’t a warm bath of shared humanity. It’s a little victory dance. “Sudden glory” names the quick, almost involuntary surge of self-congratulation we feel when we catch someone else slipping: a joke lands because it briefly elevates the laugher. That’s why the line is so pointed about the body. Hobbes calls laughter “grimaces,” stripping it of romance and treating it as a visible tic of dominance, a facial leak of social hierarchy. The elegance is in the cold physiology: you don’t laugh because you’re kind; you laugh because your status meter just jumped.

The intent is diagnostic, not decorative. Writing in a 17th-century England fractured by civil war and religious conflict, Hobbes is obsessed with what drives people beneath their stated ideals. In Leviathan, he treats society as a precarious contract among anxious, competitive creatures. Laughter becomes another mechanism of sorting and disciplining: ridicule polices norms, enforces pecking orders, and warns the vulnerable. Humor isn’t harmless; it’s a minor weapon.

Subtext: Hobbes is also skeptical of “wit” as moral capital. If laughter is often “sudden glory,” then the cleverest room may simply be the cruelest one, confusing sharpness with superiority. The line still bites because it captures how comedy can function as social finance: we “spend” someone else’s embarrassment to buy a momentary sense of being safer, smarter, higher.