It takes a certain courage and a certain greatness to be truly base.

Anouilh’s paradox suggests that genuine “baseness” (deliberate moral lowness, betrayal, or cruelty) is not merely weakness or accident but can require a grim kind of resolve. To choose the ignoble path consistently—especially when one understands what decency would demand—may take nerve: the courage to endure self-knowledge, social condemnation, or the inner cost of acting against conscience. The line also implies a perverse “greatness” in the scale or clarity of such wrongdoing: some forms of evil are not petty slips but sustained, purposeful commitments. In Anouilh’s moral universe, where characters often face stark choices between purity and compromise, the quote underscores how corruption can be an active, even heroic-seeming, decision—though still contemptible.