Nature & Animals Quote by Jose Bergamin

The line lands like a compliment and then yanks it away, exposing how praise can be its own kind of leash. Bergamin sets up a seemingly neutral observation - we call animals intelligent, we call women intelligent - then twists the knife: in both cases, it is "not usually appropriate", though "for very different reasons". That parenthetical is the trapdoor. It forces the reader to ask why the same adjective feels out of place in two contexts, and what that discomfort reveals about who gets to own a mind in public.

The animal half is straightforward: we hesitate because animal cognition is hard to measure and because "intelligent" is a human badge we grant cautiously, often anthropomorphically. The woman half is the scandal. The "inappropriate" there points to a social taboo: intelligence in women, in many cultures (and especially in the early 20th-century Catholic Spain Bergamin inhabited), is treated as an exception, an inconvenience, even an affront. It's not that women lack intelligence; it's that the culture prefers they not claim it as an identity.

Bergamin, a sharp-edged essayist shaped by the Spanish Republic, civil war, and exile, writes from a world where language polices hierarchy. The sentence mimics that policing: it shows how "intelligent" functions less as a description than as a permission slip. The cynical wit is in the symmetry. By pairing women with animals, he dares the reader to feel the insult, then redirects it: the insult isn't the comparison, it's the social reflex that makes female intellect sound "inappropriate" at all.