Justice & Law Quote by Agnes Repplier

A society that can still laugh is a society that can still think, and Agnes Repplier is arguing that the people most responsible for that laughter are the very ones we tend to imagine as humorless: intellectuals. The line is a neat inversion of the modern stereotype of the “serious thinker” as a priest of grimness. Repplier’s “by rights” is doing heavy lifting here, smuggling in a moral claim: mirth isn’t a frivolous byproduct of culture but a public good, something that needs stewardship. If thinkers won’t protect it, who will?

The subtext is mildly scolding. Repplier is writing in an era when educated seriousness often doubled as social authority, and when cultural gatekeepers could confuse refinement with austerity. By casting thinkers as “guardians,” she hints that mirth is vulnerable - not just to censorious politics, but to the dour habits of the educated class itself: the urge to pathologize pleasure, to treat humor as vulgar, to equate pessimism with depth. She’s also nudging against the idea that comedy belongs only to entertainers. For Repplier, wit is an ethical instrument: it punctures hypocrisy, relieves fanaticism, and keeps a culture from calcifying into self-importance.

There’s an implied warning: when the thoughtful retreat into solemnity, the vacuum gets filled by cruder forms of laughter - ridicule without insight, amusement without mercy. Her intent isn’t to make philosophers into court jesters; it’s to insist that intelligence has a duty to defend joy, especially the kind that clarifies rather than distracts.