Education Quote by William Hazlitt

Hazlitt is offering a brutally adult alternative to both naivete and misanthropy: see people clearly, keep your illusions on a short leash, and still refuse the emotional cheap shot of wanting them to suffer. The line turns on a paradox that feels earned rather than cute. "Think ill" is not a posture; it is an assessment, the hard-won conclusion of someone who has watched vanity, self-interest, and cruelty repeat themselves with boring reliability. Yet "not wish ill" draws a bright moral boundary between judgment and spite.

The subtext is a critique of sentimental virtue. It is easy to be benevolent when you believe humanity is basically good; your kindness costs you nothing because it is propped up by optimism. Hazlitt's version is more demanding: compassion that survives disappointment, restraint that is practiced under provocation. He implies that most moral talk is really ego management, a way to feel superior either by praising mankind (so you're on the winning team) or damning it (so you're smarter than the fools). His "highest wisdom" refuses both forms of self-flattery.

Context matters: Hazlitt wrote in the wake of revolutionary hope curdling into reaction and cynicism, a period when public ideals had been loudly advertised and then quietly betrayed. The sentence reads like a response to that whiplash. It offers a usable ethic for modern life too: maintain a clear-eyed view of human limitation without letting that clarity mutate into cruelty. The virtue here is not innocence; it's restraint with open eyes.