Education Quote by William Hazlitt

A jab aimed straight at the smug backbone of “serious” culture: the people who know the most can end up seeing the least. Hazlitt, a critic by trade and a dissenter by temperament, isn’t waging war on learning so much as on what learning can become when it hardens into identity. In early 19th-century Britain, “the learned” often meant gatekeepers of taste and legitimacy - clergy, academics, institutional men with the power to decide what counted as sense, morals, art. Hazlitt had spent enough time around them to notice the trap: expertise can start as curiosity and end as a fortified position.

The line works because it flips a comforting assumption. We like to imagine knowledge as a solvent, dissolving prejudice through exposure and evidence. Hazlitt implies the opposite happens surprisingly often: the more someone invests in a system of thought, the more incentives they have to defend it. Learning becomes sunk cost. Scholarship becomes career. Certainty becomes social standing. Narrow-mindedness, in this reading, isn’t ignorance; it’s over-commitment - the mind shrinking around what it already knows because novelty threatens the whole edifice.

There’s also a critic’s subtext here: canon and competence can masquerade as judgment. Hazlitt is warning that polished references and accumulated facts aren’t the same as openness, imagination, or moral perception. The sting is democratic: he’s puncturing the idea that intellectual hierarchy reliably tracks wisdom, and insisting that the truly educated should be harder to scandalize, not easier to offend.