Life & Wisdom Quote by George William Curtis

Anger, Curtis suggests, isn’t just a feeling; it’s a line item. By calling it an “expensive luxury,” he flips the moral script that treats outrage as righteous and cost-free. In his formulation, anger is less a spontaneous eruption than a kind of consumption: something you can afford to display, sustain, and survive. The barb lands because it exposes the hidden infrastructure behind public emotion. Losing your temper can mean losing your job, your standing, your safety, your access to the rooms where decisions get made. For people living closer to the edge, anger isn’t catharsis; it’s risk management gone wrong.

Curtis wrote in a 19th-century America built on stark hierarchies of class and power, where respectability functioned as social currency and the penalties for “improper” emotion fell unevenly. The people most entitled to moral indignation are often the people least likely to pay for it. That’s the subtext: anger gets recast as a privilege masquerading as principle. The wealthy can indulge in fury because they have buffers - savings, networks, reputations that absorb fallout. Everyone else has to translate anger into something safer: irony, silence, prayer, organizing, or the carefully curated “reasonable” tone demanded by those in charge.

The line also needles a certain romantic view of anger as authenticity. Curtis implies that the most “honest” emotion may be the most performative, because only some can afford to be unfiltered. Read now, it lands as a warning about outrage economies: who gets to rage, who gets punished for it, and how power quietly invoices the emotional life of the public.