Life & Wisdom Quote by Henrik Ibsen

Ibsen’s line is a provocation disguised as a proverb: evil isn’t the horned villain; it’s the tidy agreement that keeps the room calm. “The devil is compromise” takes a word we’re trained to praise as democratic maturity and recasts it as moral sabotage. The shock is the point. In Ibsen’s universe, the truly dangerous people aren’t monsters; they’re reasonable citizens who keep the wheels turning by sanding down conviction until nothing sharp remains.

The intent is less to glorify stubbornness than to indict the social machinery that rewards it. Compromise, here, isn’t negotiation among equals; it’s the bargain you make with a community’s hypocrisies so you can keep your standing, your salary, your marriage, your peace. Ibsen wrote in a 19th-century bourgeois culture obsessed with respectability, where “moderation” often meant looking away. His drama repeatedly stages the cost of that looking away: public virtue maintained by private cowardice, and “practical” solutions that quietly entrench injustice.

The subtext is psychological as much as political. Compromise is tempting because it feels like maturity: don’t rock the boat, don’t be extreme, don’t make it personal. Ibsen calls that temptation diabolical because it turns ethics into accounting. Once you start trading truths for comfort, you don’t just lose the argument; you lose the self who could have made it. That’s why the line still lands now, in an era of “both sides” reflexes and brand-safe opinions: it names the soft corruption that arrives not with a crash, but with a polite nod.