Life & Wisdom Quote by Charles Caleb Colton

Colton’s line is a small, sharp scalpel aimed at a familiar social performance: fear as a respectable mask for contempt. “Pretend” does the heavy lifting. It suggests not a sincere emotion but a strategic posture, the kind that lets people launder hostility through the language of self-defense. If you can call something “dangerous,” you don’t have to admit you simply don’t like it. You get moral cover, and the despised object is framed as the aggressor.

The second turn tightens the screw: “more often despise what we really fear.” Here, contempt becomes a counterphobic reflex. When fear threatens our self-image - as rational, brave, in control - disdain restores hierarchy. We shrink what scares us by sneering at it. The quote’s symmetry is its argument: the emotions aren’t opposites; they’re collaborators, each disguising the other depending on what the ego needs.

Colton writes from an early 19th-century British milieu where manners, class boundaries, and religious respectability demanded emotional discipline. Open hatred was vulgar; open fear was humiliating. So the culture incentivized conversion: fear gets recoded as “principle,” “prudence,” “taste.” Despise gets recoded as “concern.” That context makes the aphorism feel less like pop psychology and more like an indictment of social hypocrisy: our public emotions are often not what we feel, but what will play well.