Life & Wisdom Quote by Evelyn Waugh

National character as self-portrait and insult: Waugh skewers Englishness by pretending to praise it. The line works because it’s a joke with a trapdoor. “You never find an Englishman among the under-dogs” flatters a certain imperial self-image: the English are organizers, rulers, the people who end up on top. Then comes the dry pivot, “except in England, of course,” which punctures the myth by bringing it home to the soggy facts of class, poverty, and inertia. Abroad, Englishness is a posture of competence; at home, it’s a rigid hierarchy that reliably produces losers.

Waugh’s specific intent is less sociology than sabotage. He’s needling both the sentimental liberal fantasy of the noble oppressed and the Tory fantasy of national virtue. The underdog, in his hands, isn’t an emblem of moral worth; it’s a role assigned by the machinery of an English society that romanticizes tradition while grinding people into their “place.” That last clause lands with Waugh’s signature contempt: the “of course” implies that anyone who’s been paying attention already knows the punchline.

Context matters. Waugh wrote as a Catholic convert and an aristocratic-minded satirist watching Britain wobble between imperial hangover and modern egalitarian rhetoric. His novels are crowded with social climbers, dilettantes, and institutions that preserve themselves by humiliating individuals. This quip compresses that worldview: English confidence exported as brand, English inequality retained as policy. The laugh is sharp because it’s aimed at a nation that likes its pride tidy and its suffering discreet.