Life & Wisdom Quote by Georges Bernanos

Bernanos turns moral certainty into a boomerang: the moment you posture as judge, you risk becoming accomplice. The line is built like a trapdoor. It begins with a blunt challenge to authority ("Who are you..."), then tightens into a paradox that feels almost prosecutorial in its logic: condemnation isn’t clean; it’s adhesive. To denounce is to handle the thing, to fixate on it, to let it occupy your imagination and your identity. The rhetoric is pointedly Catholic in its moral psychology, but it lands as a broader indictment of purity culture before the term existed.

The intent isn’t to excuse wrongdoing. It’s to expose the ego that often rides shotgun with moral critique: the thrill of being righteous, the social currency of outrage, the comfort of drawing a bright line between "their" filth and "my" virtue. Bernanos suggests that this performance can mimic the sin it attacks because it feeds on the same raw materials: obsession, pride, and a hunger for control. "Espouses it" is the key verb - condemnation becomes a kind of marriage, a binding vow that keeps the condemned act present, rehearsed, and strangely intimate.

Context matters. Bernanos wrote in a Europe scarred by mass politics, propaganda, and the easy sanctification of violence in the name of "order". In that atmosphere, condemnation wasn’t merely personal; it was a civic act that could grease the machinery of persecution. The quote reads like a warning flare: when morality becomes a weapon, it corrodes the hand that swings it.