Art & Creativity Quote by Christopher Isherwood

Isherwood skewers the cozy self-congratulation of “progress” that costs the powerful nothing. The line turns on a deliberately flat phrase - “our attitude has changed” - a piece of social-admin language that treats prejudice as a mood swing rather than a structure. He hears the smugness in it: the majority granting itself moral credit for feeling nicer, as if justice were a matter of taste.

The quote’s bite comes from its pivot to “by the strangest coincidence,” a dry, surgical irony that exposes how conveniently sentiment stops where sacrifice begins. If people truly “don’t dislike” the marginalized “any more,” why are the mechanisms of harm still intact? Isherwood forces the reader to notice the mismatch between private feeling and public reality: prejudice can be rebranded as tolerance while the law continues to do the dirty work. The phrase “still on the books” lands like a stamp in an office - impersonal, bureaucratic, and therefore harder to argue with. It’s not about what anyone claims to believe; it’s about what the state still authorizes.

Context matters: Isherwood, a gay man who moved between Britain, Weimar-era Europe, and the United States, lived through periods when “acceptance” was often a social performance masking legal and institutional punishment. The subtext is a warning about liberal complacency: attitude shifts are cheap, and they can even become a way to avoid dismantling injustice. He’s not asking for warmer hearts. He’s asking why the law hasn’t moved.