Wit & Attitude Quote by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Calling something "not worth refuting" is the genteel way of slamming a door without admitting you were ever in the room. Shelley is exquisitely alert to how that phrase works as social choreography: it lets the speaker claim intellectual superiority while sidestepping the labor and risk of argument. The line’s bite comes from its forced binary. Either the claim is so stupid that engagement would be wasted, or it’s so strong it threatens the speaker’s position. There’s no third option where the dismissive person is simply busy, uncertain, or wrong. Shelley riggs the logic to expose a cowardice masquerading as taste.

The subtext is about power, not propositions. Declaring an idea beneath refutation is often a tactic of gatekeeping: it polices what can be taken seriously, who gets to be heard, and which questions are allowed into the salon, the parliament, the academy. Shelley, a Romantic poet with radical politics and a long history of being treated as scandal rather than interlocutor, knew the move firsthand. When institutions can’t easily answer an argument - about religion, monarchy, class, freedom - they often demote it into bad manners.

The sentence itself performs what it advocates: swift, surgical, almost disdainful. "Flagrantly stupid" is a slap; "the very crux of the problem" is the turn of the blade. Shelley isn’t just asking readers to be fair-minded. He’s warning them that dismissal is a diagnostic: contempt can signal either obvious nonsense or a truth sharp enough to cut through the room’s agreed-upon lies.