War & Peace Quote by Rodney Dangerfield

Dangerfield turns the arc of a lifetime into a two-beat gag: the same desire, the shrinking belief in its payoff. The opening clause is all muscle and sunrise - "full of fight and hope" - a young man's engine made of ego, energy, and moral certainty. Then he repeats the ambition at seventy and punctures it with one small, brutal correction: "but he know he can't". The grammar even slumps. It's not "knows", it's "know" - a clipped, street-level resignation that feels less like wisdom than wear.

The intent isn't to mock idealism so much as to expose how it gets domesticated. Reform is framed as a personal impulse, almost a temperament, not a program. That matters: Dangerfield isn't talking about movements, he's talking about the private fantasy that your anger and good intentions are enough to bend the furniture of reality. At twenty, that fantasy reads as purpose. At seventy, it's the same itch under thinner skin.

The subtext carries Dangerfield's signature: the world doesn't reward sincerity; it negotiates, delays, humiliates. His comedy thrived on the sense that institutions - work, marriage, status - grind you down while pretending to be your "real life". In that context, the line becomes a quiet indictment of a culture that sells reform as a youthful brand and later offers "acceptance" as a consolation prize.

It's funny because it's sad, and it's sad because it feels familiar: not the death of wanting, but the death of expecting.