Wit & Attitude Quote by Richard Steele

Steele’s line is a neat little trapdoor: it starts with compassion and ends with indictment. “The fool within himself” isn’t just ignorant; he’s self-contained, sealed off by his own confidence or limitations. In that private state, Steele grants him a kind of innocence - he’s “the object of pity,” not rage. The sting arrives with “until he is flattered.” Suddenly the fool becomes socially activated. Flattery doesn’t create stupidity; it weaponizes it, giving it a sense of importance, a microphone, an audience.

The intent is moral but not pious. Steele, a dramatist and essayist steeped in the coffeehouse culture of early 18th-century London, is writing for a world where reputation was currency and public opinion was a spectator sport. In that setting, flatterers aren’t harmless courtiers; they’re enablers who turn private delusion into public nuisance. The subtext is as much about the flatterer as the fool: a society that rewards agreeable nonsense will manufacture fools at scale.

What makes the sentence work is its clean, almost legal structure: pity has a condition. It hinges on a behavioral switch, not a personality trait. Steele implies that folly becomes blameworthy precisely when it starts feeding on applause. There’s a modern echo here: the tragic figure isn’t the clueless person offline; it’s the one emboldened by validation, mistaking attention for proof. Flattery doesn’t just soothe egos - it recruits them.