Daily Inspiration Quote by Florenz Ziegfeld

Beauty isn’t praised here as an aesthetic pleasure; it’s drafted as policy. Ziegfeld’s line lands with the breezy certainty of a man who helped industrialize glamour, turning the chorus line into both spectacle and labor force. The casual “of course” is doing the dirty work: it frames a harsh hiring rule as obvious common sense, the kind of social script that doesn’t need defending because the audience has already been trained to agree.

As a producer behind the Ziegfeld Follies, he wasn’t merely commenting on taste; he was describing a business model. Early 20th-century Broadway sold an aspirational fantasy to an urban mass audience, and the female body was a central piece of that commodity. “Applicant” is the coldest word in the sentence, corporate and interchangeable, reducing performers to a pipeline of faces and figures. “Paramount asset” completes the transaction: beauty is capital, the performer is a portfolio, and everything else - voice, skill, intelligence, endurance - becomes negotiable.

The subtext is as modern as it is period-specific: power gets to define “requirements,” then pretends those requirements are natural laws. Ziegfeld’s genius (and the indictment embedded in the quote) is that he names the quiet truth of show business without euphemism. The line sells a dream to the crowd while reminding the worker what she is valued for, and how quickly that value can be replaced.