Parenting & Family Quote by John Dos Passos

Dos Passos lands this line with the hard simplicity of a shop-floor proverb, and that’s the point: it sounds like common sense until you notice how radical its moral radius is. “More than himself and his kids” rejects the cozy American script where responsibility ends at the front door. The phrasing isn’t lofty or utopian; it’s bodily, almost medical: “to feel right.” Work here isn’t just wages or duty, it’s a psychological alignment. If your labor serves only private comfort, something in you goes crooked.

The intent is quietly collectivist without waving a flag. Dos Passos, writing out of a 20th-century America roiled by industrial capitalism, war, and propaganda, kept returning to the way modern systems atomize people while demanding their loyalty. This sentence pushes back against the shrink-wrap version of masculinity that reduces a man to provider-as-silo. It also implies a critique of a society that offers men only two acceptable motives: self-interest and family obligation. Anything beyond that gets labeled naive or political.

Subtext: the hunger for meaning can’t be satisfied by consumption or even by love, if love becomes just another private possession. “Work” becomes a civic act, a link to strangers, unions, neighbors, the nation, the species. Dos Passos knows that people will sacrifice for their kids; he’s asking whether they’ll recognize everyone else’s kids in the bargain.