"A man can look upon his life and accept it as good or evil; it is far, far harder for him to confess that it has been unimportant in the sum of things"
About this Quote
Kempton goes for the ego’s soft underbelly: not guilt, but insignificance. “Good or evil” are moral categories that still let you cast yourself as a protagonist. Even the villain gets a plot. The real insult, Kempton suggests, is the possibility that your life doesn’t even rise to the level of a story anyone needs.
The line works because it smuggles in a devastating hierarchy of judgments. Accepting your life as “evil” can be perversely comforting; it implies agency, impact, a footprint. Accepting it as “good” flatters the self. But “unimportant in the sum of things” is cosmic accounting: your choices may have been sincere, your feelings intense, your hardships real, and still the world’s ledger barely registers you. That’s a tougher confession because it demands you surrender not just virtue, but relevance.
As a journalist who wrote in the long mid-century shadow of world wars, ideological crusades, and American political theater, Kempton knew how easily personal narratives borrow grandeur from public events. His career was built on watching ordinary ambition dress itself up in History’s clothing. The subtext is a warning about that temptation: we prefer moral melodrama to statistical reality.
There’s also a sly democratic sting here. If most lives are, in the grand tally, “unimportant,” then the cultural obsession with legacy and “making a difference” starts to look like a coping mechanism - a refusal to live without an audience. Kempton doesn’t offer solace; he offers clarity, and it cuts.
The line works because it smuggles in a devastating hierarchy of judgments. Accepting your life as “evil” can be perversely comforting; it implies agency, impact, a footprint. Accepting it as “good” flatters the self. But “unimportant in the sum of things” is cosmic accounting: your choices may have been sincere, your feelings intense, your hardships real, and still the world’s ledger barely registers you. That’s a tougher confession because it demands you surrender not just virtue, but relevance.
As a journalist who wrote in the long mid-century shadow of world wars, ideological crusades, and American political theater, Kempton knew how easily personal narratives borrow grandeur from public events. His career was built on watching ordinary ambition dress itself up in History’s clothing. The subtext is a warning about that temptation: we prefer moral melodrama to statistical reality.
There’s also a sly democratic sting here. If most lives are, in the grand tally, “unimportant,” then the cultural obsession with legacy and “making a difference” starts to look like a coping mechanism - a refusal to live without an audience. Kempton doesn’t offer solace; he offers clarity, and it cuts.
Quote Details
| Topic | Meaning of Life |
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