Wit & Attitude Quote by John Fowles

A line like this is designed to sting, and Fowles knows exactly why: it turns the language of “race” into a trap, then snaps it shut on the reader’s moral reflexes. You come in expecting a provocation about identity, and you leave confronted with something colder and more accusatory: a claim that the real divide is cognitive, not cultural. It’s the kind of epigram that pretends to simplify prejudice while quietly reallocating it.

The intent isn’t scientific taxonomy; it’s a moral sorting mechanism. By borrowing the charged vocabulary of race, Fowles exposes how eagerly humans reach for categories that justify hierarchy. But he also indulges that impulse. Calling people “stupid” isn’t analysis, it’s a verdict, and the quote flatters anyone who nods along by offering them an unearned passport to the “intelligent” side. That’s the subtext: a cynical invitation to self-exemption.

Context matters: Fowles wrote in a postwar Britain suspicious of mass culture, bureaucracy, and herd thinking, and his fiction often pits individual consciousness against social conformity. Read through that lens, “stupid” becomes less an IQ score than a refusal to see, to question, to take responsibility. Still, the formulation is deliberately absolutist, almost reactionary in its neatness. It mimics the brutal clarity of bigotry to argue against bigotry, yet risks reproducing the same contempt it claims to transcend. The line works because it’s both critique and confession: it exposes the hunger for superiority even as it feeds it.