"Whatever people in general do not understand, they are always prepared to dislike; the incomprehensible is always the obnoxious"
About this Quote
Landon nails a social reflex that still powers half the internet: ignorance doesn’t just produce confusion, it recruits hostility. The line is built like a blunt syllogism - not poetic mist, but a cold observation about group behavior. “People in general” widens the target to a crowd, not a villain; she’s diagnosing a default setting. The phrasing “always prepared” matters, too: dislike isn’t the end of a process, it’s a preloaded stance waiting for an excuse.
The subtext is protective. If something is “incomprehensible,” it threatens status, taste, hierarchy - the quiet economy of who gets to feel competent. Dislike becomes a way to regain control: label the unfamiliar “obnoxious” and you don’t have to admit you’re lost. Landon isn’t claiming people hate complexity for its own sake; she’s saying the social cost of not understanding is high enough that many will flip the board rather than play.
Context sharpens the intent. Writing as a highly visible woman in early 19th-century literary culture, Landon lived inside a machine that moralized, gossiped, and punished opacity - especially in women’s work and private life. The “incomprehensible” could be avant-garde art, intellectual ambition, or any behavior that refuses easy categorization. Her sentence reads like self-defense and cultural critique at once: a warning to artists about reception, and a warning to audiences about their own lazy cruelty.
It works because it’s unsentimental. Landon doesn’t ask for understanding; she exposes the mechanism that makes understanding politically and emotionally inconvenient.
The subtext is protective. If something is “incomprehensible,” it threatens status, taste, hierarchy - the quiet economy of who gets to feel competent. Dislike becomes a way to regain control: label the unfamiliar “obnoxious” and you don’t have to admit you’re lost. Landon isn’t claiming people hate complexity for its own sake; she’s saying the social cost of not understanding is high enough that many will flip the board rather than play.
Context sharpens the intent. Writing as a highly visible woman in early 19th-century literary culture, Landon lived inside a machine that moralized, gossiped, and punished opacity - especially in women’s work and private life. The “incomprehensible” could be avant-garde art, intellectual ambition, or any behavior that refuses easy categorization. Her sentence reads like self-defense and cultural critique at once: a warning to artists about reception, and a warning to audiences about their own lazy cruelty.
It works because it’s unsentimental. Landon doesn’t ask for understanding; she exposes the mechanism that makes understanding politically and emotionally inconvenient.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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