Daily Inspiration Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt’s line is a cold shower aimed at human self-importance, and he delivers it with the critic’s favorite weapon: perspective. By imagining “a superior race of being,” he pulls off a sly inversion. Humans like to picture themselves judged by God, history, or posterity and still coming out noble. Hazlitt asks what happens if the judge isn’t moral, just smarter - not holier, simply higher up the ladder of perception. Under that gaze, our solemn claims to “extraordinary sanctity and virtue” shrink into theater. The word “pretensions” is doing the heavy lifting: it frames virtue not as an achievement but as a performance we’re eager to market.

The intent isn’t merely to mock religion or ethics; it’s to puncture a particular 19th-century confidence that mankind is progressing into moral grandeur. Hazlitt, writing in the wake of revolutionary idealism curdling into reaction and empire, had reason to distrust grand declarations of purity. He’d seen how quickly “virtue” becomes a badge pinned on power.

The subtext is also personal and professional. As a critic, Hazlitt distrusts the inflated register, the moralizing tone that pretends to be above appetite, vanity, and politics. By outsourcing judgment to an imaginary superior species, he sidesteps sermonizing and lands a sharper blow: if even a hypothetical observer would laugh, what does that say about the scale of our self-deception? Ridiculous, here, isn’t casual insult; it’s the moral category of the absurd - the moment when our lofty self-story collides with what we actually do.