Life & Wisdom Quote by Nicolas Chamfort

Public opinion, Chamfort implies, is often less a moral compass than a weather vane: loud, reactive, and easily spun by whoever controls the gusts. The sting in his line comes from its refusal to treat “the people” as inherently wise. He’s not attacking democracy in the abstract so much as exposing a recurring social pattern: collectives can become sanctimonious precisely when they feel most certain they’re virtuous.

Chamfort wrote at the edge of the French Revolution, when “the public” was being reinvented as a political force and also weaponized as a tribunal. In that atmosphere, opinion didn’t merely judge; it sentenced. The subtext is survival-grade skepticism about crowds that confuse consensus with truth and indignation with justice. “Certain times” matters: he’s targeting moments of panic, moral crusade, or ideological fervor, when the pressure to conform turns thinking into a liability. Public opinion becomes “the worst” not because it’s popular, but because it’s self-reinforcing and anonymous. No single person owns the cruelty, so everyone feels licensed to participate.

The phrasing also carries a writer’s cynicism about social hypocrisy. Private people can be inconsistent; publics demand purity. They flatten nuance, reward performative certainty, and punish complexity as betrayal. Chamfort’s wit is in the inversion: the very thing Enlightenment thinkers hoped would check tyrants can, under the right conditions, become a tyrant of its own - efficiently, righteously, and with the comforting alibi of “everyone agrees.”