Life & Wisdom Quote by Emma Lazarus

“Absolute contempt” is a fierce kind of cleanliness: not just disagreement, but refusal of contact. Lazarus’s line works because it weaponizes disgust as a moral boundary. “The particular article” stays unnamed, a rhetorical move that shrinks the target even as it condemns it. She won’t dignify it with citation; she won’t launder it through paraphrase. Then comes the clincher: “too vile to touch.” The language is tactile, almost hygienic, as if the text were contagious. That’s not just anger; it’s a warning about how ideas spread when you handle them, quote them, circulate them.

The intent here is less to rebut than to quarantine. Lazarus, best known now for the Statue of Liberty sonnet, wrote in a period when print culture could turn prejudice and rumor into respectable “opinion” overnight. In that world, to engage an ugly piece of writing on its own terms could mean granting it a platform. Her sentence anticipates a modern dilemma: do you refute a toxic article, or do you starve it of oxygen?

The subtext is also personal and political. As a Jewish American writer who defended immigrants and criticized antisemitism, Lazarus had reason to recognize that some “articles” aren’t arguments but provocations engineered to degrade. Her contempt isn’t delicate; it’s strategic. She’s drawing a line between debate (where truth might be clarified) and propaganda (where the point is harm). The power of the quote is its insistence that not everything deserves a response, and that restraint can be a form of resistance.