Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton’s line skewers hatred not as a response to reality, but as a self-sealing habit of mind. It’s structured like a trap: hate is presented first as an effect (“because we do not know them”), then immediately revealed as a cause (“will not know them because we hate them”). That tight loop is the point. He’s diagnosing a psychological closed circuit where ignorance isn’t accidental; it’s curated. The sentence doesn’t merely plead for tolerance, it implies complicity: people choose not-knowing because knowing would threaten the satisfactions hate provides.

The subtext is that prejudice often masquerades as evidence-based judgment. “I dislike them because…” gets to wear the costume of reason, when the real engine is avoidance. Colton’s phrasing suggests hate is less an opinion than a barrier to information, a refusal of contact. The line’s quiet sting is that it relocates responsibility. If hate persists, it’s not because the hated group remains unknowable, but because the hater maintains the conditions of ignorance: social distance, selective stories, motivated interpretation.

Context matters: Colton wrote in an era of rigid class boundaries, religious suspicion, and imperial hierarchies, when “knowing” someone across lines of rank or identity was often socially discouraged. Yet the mechanism he names feels painfully modern: media bubbles, algorithmic segregation, and political branding all reward the same circularity. The quote works because it reduces a sprawling social problem to a clean piece of logic, then lets the logic accuse us.