Daily Inspiration Quote by Stephen Leacock

Leacock’s line lands like a polite dinner-table joke with a blade in it. By defining a “sportsman” not as a paragon of fair play but as a man who periodically “has to” kill, he punctures the self-flattering mythology around sport hunting. The key move is the phrase “every now and then”: it domesticates violence, making it sound like a recurring errand, a healthful habit, a little maintenance on masculinity. Then “simply has to” smuggles in compulsion. The sportsman isn’t choosing; he’s obeying an itch. Leacock turns what’s marketed as character-building recreation into something closer to an appetite.

The subtext is less about animals than about the cultural permission structure that lets certain kinds of aggression pass as virtue. “Sportsman” is a moral costume word: it suggests restraint, skill, and honor. “Kill something” strips away the costume and leaves the blunt verb, forcing the reader to feel the mismatch between genteel branding and bloody outcome. It’s satire aimed at a class identity as much as a pastime.

Context matters: Leacock wrote in an era when imperial adventure, big-game hunting, and clubby leisure cultures were intertwined with status. As an economist with a comedian’s instincts, he’s also winking at consumption: the hunt becomes a luxury good, purchased not just with money but with moral narrative. The joke works because it’s compact, audible in a single breath, and accusatory without sounding sermon-like. It lets the listener laugh, then notice what they laughed at.