Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Astell

Astell lands the insult with surgical class consciousness: “scum” is not just a slur, it’s a warning about what happens when power is unmoored from responsibility. The line isn’t a genteel defense of aristocracy so much as a diagnosis of resentment turned into governance. Her target is the newly empowered bully, the kind of person who has learned the manners of domination but none of the disciplines that might restrain it. “Most Tyrannical” is the kicker; it flips the comforting idea that tyranny is a top-down disease. Astell suggests it can metastasize anywhere, especially among those who feel power is overdue.

The phrasing “their Betters” makes the quote sound like pure snobbery, and that’s part of its force. Astell is writing in a world where “better” often meant birth, education, and property, but also, more pointedly, self-command. The subtext is moral as much as social: she’s hinting that the worst rulers are the ones who confuse elevation with entitlement and repay past humiliation with present cruelty. “Greatest Insolence” captures a familiar political psychology: the newly powerful perform hardness, because they’re terrified of looking temporary.

Context sharpens the edge. As a conservative-leaning feminist critic of empty authority (especially male authority over women), Astell had reason to distrust swaggering competence. Her line reads like an early-modern version of a perennial fear: that populist empowerment, without institutions and norms that cultivate restraint, can produce not liberation but vindictive rule.