Daily Inspiration Quote by Cleveland Amory

The sting in Amory's line is the scare-quoted "good" a tiny typographic eye-roll that exposes how morality gets smuggled into nostalgia. A "good family" isn't being measured against any stable standard of care or character; it's being measured against a fading snapshot, usually burnished by selective memory and social pressure. The punchline is that goodness, in this cultural logic, is always retroactive: the family is "good" precisely because it belongs to a past that can no longer argue back.

Amory, a patrician chronicler of American manners with a satirist's ear for hypocrisy, is skewering a particular mid-century reflex: treating decline as evidence. If something feels complicated now divorce, blended households, women working, kids talking back then the past gets recast as proof of virtue. The subtext is cruelly efficient: when we say "used to be better", we're often really saying "used to be quieter", "used to be more obedient", or "used to keep its mess off the front porch."

As a historian, Amory knows that the "better" era is rarely better on the record; it's better in the story we tell at reunions and in campaign speeches. The line also indicts the way families become public symbols: politicians and pundits can mourn "the family" without ever naming which families were excluded, constrained, or harmed by that supposedly golden model. By turning "good" into a moving target that always points backward, Amory shows how nostalgia doubles as a moral weapon and an alibi for resisting change.