Life's Pleasures Quote by Charles Scribner, Jr.

Accountability, delivered with a hangover’s sting and a publisher’s deadpan. The line works because it weaponizes a familiar ritual of regret: the morning-after audit of whatever swagger we performed the night before. Instead of treating drunken promises as disposable theater, Scribner flips the script and demands they be honored in daylight. The joke is that this is less moral uplift than behavioral conditioning. Follow through once or twice and you’ll start policing your own speech; the pain of fulfillment becomes the lesson.

The subtext is shrewdly social. Drunken talk is often where ego, longing, and aggression slip the leash, and culture usually offers an escape hatch: “I didn’t mean it.” Scribner denies that loophole. He’s not romanticizing intoxication; he’s exposing how often we rely on it to outsource responsibility. The punch line “That will teach you to keep your mouth shut!” lands because it admits the real goal isn’t virtue, it’s self-preservation. Silence becomes a strategy for avoiding future obligations.

Context matters: a publisher’s world runs on words that bind - contracts, commitments, public statements - and on the reputational cost of speaking loosely. Read as industry wisdom, it’s a reminder that language isn’t just expression; it’s currency. The quip also carries a faintly Calvinist edge: you can’t un-say what you said, so you might as well let consequences do the editing. It’s comedy with a ledger book behind it.