"The people I am most afraid of are the clever ones. They have so many brains that they can think of mischief against me"

A ruler who admits fearing the clever reveals both an authoritarian instinct and a deep personal insecurity. For Wilhelm II, the “clever ones” are not assets to be cultivated but unpredictable centers of agency. He suspects that intelligence naturally inclines toward subversion, that minds capable of analysis will also be capable of plotting, ridiculing, or outmaneuvering him. The phrase “so many brains” carries a sneer: intellect appears as excess, an unwieldy surplus that proliferates possibilities beyond the ruler’s control.

Such fear is historically intelligible. Wilhelm presided over a rapidly modernizing empire, with an expanding press, a volatile parliament, rising socialist movements, and a bureaucracy filled with educated experts. Cleverness in this setting meant not just private brilliance but networks of discourse, journals, salons, parties, and staff colleges, where plans could be refined and authority questioned. Against the blunt instrument of military power, the agile coalition of ideas and strategies posed a subtler, often more destabilizing threat.

At the psychological level, the remark signals anxiety about manipulation. Having dismissed Bismarck and often been lampooned abroad, Wilhelm learned that clever advisors can also be clever adversaries. By naming intelligence as “mischief,” he diminishes dissent as childish prank even as he confesses its potency; satire, bureaucratic obstruction, and strategic leaking can erode legitimacy without open revolt.

There is a broader political lesson. Leaders who fear the clever tend to reward loyalty over competence, surround themselves with flatterers, and dull feedback mechanisms. Innovation withers, strategic blind spots widen, and the state’s capacity declines. Intelligence is ambivalent, it can plot or it can solve, but suppressing it guarantees mediocrity. The statement thus reads as an x-ray of autocratic fragility: power that cannot tolerate smart scrutiny is already undermining itself, and the mischief it dreads becomes the misrule it creates. History rewards rulers who harness intellect instead of fearing it.