"Better belly burst than good liquor be lost"
About this Quote
Gluttony has rarely sounded so industrious. Swift’s line takes a tavern maxim - waste not, want not - and drives it straight into the absurd, where “prudence” becomes a death wish. The joke lands because the logic is airtight in miniature: if liquor is “good,” losing it is a moral failure; if the belly bursts, that’s merely the body’s inconvenience. Swift isn’t praising drunken heroism so much as exposing how easily people dress appetite up as principle.
The phrasing matters. “Better ... than ...” mimics the tone of sober, ethical comparison, the language of sermons and civic advice, but the outcome is grotesque. That mismatch is the engine: a moral calculus applied to something patently unmoral, even self-destructive. “Good liquor” is treated as a public treasure, while the human body is expendable - a neat inversion that makes the hedonist sound like a patriot.
In Swift’s world, that inversion isn’t just barroom slapstick; it’s a miniature version of his larger project. He specialized in showing how “reasonable” arguments can justify cruelty, vanity, and collective stupidity when the underlying values are rotten. Read alongside the era’s drinking culture and the politics of consumption - where status, hospitality, and vice braid together - the line becomes a satirical postcard from a society that can’t tell thrift from compulsion. The belly bursting is the punchline and the warning: rationalization always ends up demanding a body to pay.
The phrasing matters. “Better ... than ...” mimics the tone of sober, ethical comparison, the language of sermons and civic advice, but the outcome is grotesque. That mismatch is the engine: a moral calculus applied to something patently unmoral, even self-destructive. “Good liquor” is treated as a public treasure, while the human body is expendable - a neat inversion that makes the hedonist sound like a patriot.
In Swift’s world, that inversion isn’t just barroom slapstick; it’s a miniature version of his larger project. He specialized in showing how “reasonable” arguments can justify cruelty, vanity, and collective stupidity when the underlying values are rotten. Read alongside the era’s drinking culture and the politics of consumption - where status, hospitality, and vice braid together - the line becomes a satirical postcard from a society that can’t tell thrift from compulsion. The belly bursting is the punchline and the warning: rationalization always ends up demanding a body to pay.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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