"Whatever people in general do not understand, they are always prepared to dislike; the incomprehensible is always the obnoxious"
About this Quote
Human beings often treat what they cannot decipher as a threat. The line captures a reflex that psychologists would later call ambiguity aversion and the need for closure: when explanations are scarce, discomfort surges, and the fastest path to relief is dismissal or disdain. Ignorance rarely feels like a neutral gap; it stings the ego, exposes uncertainty, and so we convert bewilderment into moral judgment. The strange becomes not just puzzling but blameworthy.
Letitia Landon wrote amid the early 19th-century British literary marketplace, where periodicals manufactured taste and scapegoats. A woman who published widely under the initials L.E.L., she endured both admiration and suspicion, her celebrity filtered through rigid codes of propriety. She knew how novelty, complexity, or feminine agency could be branded offensive simply because it defied easy reading. Her aphorism speaks to the crowd psychology of her era: the press and the parlor prefer what can be paraphrased; what resists paraphrase becomes dangerous. Landon often explored how public sentiment moves from curiosity to censure when art does not present a single, digestible meaning.
There is a linguistic edge too. Obnoxious in her day still carried an older sense of being exposed to harm or liable to censure, alongside our modern meaning of disagreeable. The incomprehensible is not merely irritating; it is made a proper object of attack. From misunderstood art to scientific innovation, the first public response is often scorn, until familiarity dulls the offense.
The observation remains current. Online, opacity triggers pile-ons; unfamiliar communities are caricatured; complex research is dismissed as jargon or conspiracy. The antidote is not forced agreement but trained curiosity and patience, the acceptance that confusion can precede understanding. When we resist the rush to dislike, the horizon of what counts as intelligible — and thus as human — grows wider.
Letitia Landon wrote amid the early 19th-century British literary marketplace, where periodicals manufactured taste and scapegoats. A woman who published widely under the initials L.E.L., she endured both admiration and suspicion, her celebrity filtered through rigid codes of propriety. She knew how novelty, complexity, or feminine agency could be branded offensive simply because it defied easy reading. Her aphorism speaks to the crowd psychology of her era: the press and the parlor prefer what can be paraphrased; what resists paraphrase becomes dangerous. Landon often explored how public sentiment moves from curiosity to censure when art does not present a single, digestible meaning.
There is a linguistic edge too. Obnoxious in her day still carried an older sense of being exposed to harm or liable to censure, alongside our modern meaning of disagreeable. The incomprehensible is not merely irritating; it is made a proper object of attack. From misunderstood art to scientific innovation, the first public response is often scorn, until familiarity dulls the offense.
The observation remains current. Online, opacity triggers pile-ons; unfamiliar communities are caricatured; complex research is dismissed as jargon or conspiracy. The antidote is not forced agreement but trained curiosity and patience, the acceptance that confusion can precede understanding. When we resist the rush to dislike, the horizon of what counts as intelligible — and thus as human — grows wider.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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