Wit & Attitude Quote by Quintilian

Quintilian lands a neat little trap for the status-seeker: wisdom performed for an easy audience isn’t wisdom at all, it’s theater. The line is built on a social switcheroo - “among fools” versus “among the wise” - that exposes how quickly “being wise” collapses once the room changes. In a crowd that can’t evaluate you, the temptation is to inflate: ornate language, confident pronouncements, flashy contrarianism. It reads as intelligence because no one has the tools to interrogate it. Put the same person among people who actually know the subject and the costume shows: overstatement becomes ignorance, swagger becomes insecurity.

As an educator and rhetorician in imperial Rome, Quintilian isn’t just dunking on pretenders; he’s warning about the moral hazard of rhetoric itself. Training in eloquence can slide into a kind of intellectual cosplay, especially in a culture where public speaking was currency and reputation was a civic weapon. The subtext is almost diagnostic: if your “wisdom” depends on the audience being weaker than you, it’s not wisdom, it’s dominance. Real competence often sounds plainer, slower, more conditional - because it’s accountable to reality and to peers.

The sting is that he’s also talking to his students: don’t optimize for applause. Optimize for the judgment of those who can actually call your bluff.