Daily Inspiration Quote by Alexander Woollcott

Pleasure, Woollcott implies, is a contraband substance: the more honest you are about what you want, the more likely society has already filed it under sin, crime, or calories. The line works because it pretends to be a confession while actually staging an indictment. “All the things” is comic overreach, a deliberately totalizing complaint that turns personal weakness into a cultural diagnosis. By stacking “immoral, illegal, or fattening” he maps three different police forces - the church, the state, and the mirror - then lets them blur into one. The joke lands where those categories overlap: the modern subject isn’t merely tempted; he’s audited.

Woollcott, a sharp-tongued critic in a Prohibition-era America that loved rules in public and loopholes in private, knew how moral posturing operates as entertainment. His quip flatters the audience’s cynicism: you’re not uniquely depraved, you’re simply alive in a world that brands appetite as suspect. It’s also a savvy bit of self-mythmaking. The critic, by profession, watches others and judges; here he flips the gaze back on himself, but only to show how impossible “good behavior” feels when the definition of good is designed to be joyless.

The subtext is less “I’m naughty” than “your virtues are punitive.” It’s a one-line portrait of a culture where desire is always being reframed as a problem to manage, and where the easiest way to sound sophisticated is to confess with a smirk.