Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Barbarism, Hazlitt suggests, isn’t a lack of refinement; it’s the smug certainty that refinement belongs only to you. The line flips a comfortable Victorian-era assumption on its head: that “civilized” people can reliably spot the “barbarous” by instinct. Hazlitt, a critic who made a career of puncturing fashionable opinion, treats that instinct as the real savagery. The insult lands because it targets not manners but mindset: the provincial ego dressed up as moral judgment.

The subtext is a warning about how quickly taste becomes ideology. Calling someone’s customs “barbarous” is rarely a neutral aesthetic claim; it’s a bid for power, a way to turn personal preference into a universal yardstick. Hazlitt’s phrasing is surgical: “true barbarian” implies a counterfeit barbarism we’re used to condemning, while the authentic version is quieter, socially rewarded, and therefore harder to see. “Tastes and prejudices” are paired to show how easily culture and bias blur. What begins as “I don’t like it” hardens into “it’s inferior.”

Context matters. Hazlitt wrote in an England swollen with imperial confidence and class gatekeeping, where judgments about art, speech, religion, and “foreign” life carried real consequences. His critique isn’t just cosmopolitan etiquette; it’s an attack on the moral alibi of superiority. The sentence works because it refuses the reader a safe vantage point: the barbarian isn’t out there at the margins, it’s the person most convinced they’re at the center.