Life & Wisdom Quote by Doris Lessing

Lessing lands this like a moral slap: debt and charity, credit and theft, all start to blur when you follow the power. The line isn’t a quaint thrift lesson; it’s an attack on the social story that borrowing is respectable while begging is shameful. She collapses that distinction by pointing to the same underlying fact in both acts: dependency. Whether you ask for alms or a loan, you’re admitting need to someone who can afford to say no. The discomfort isn’t in the request; it’s in the hierarchy it exposes.

Then she turns the knife on the other side of the transaction. “Lending with interest” is framed not as prudent enterprise but as extraction dressed up in paperwork. Lessing’s subtext is that respectable systems can do the same damage as crimes, just with better lighting and legal cover. Interest becomes the polite mechanism that converts another person’s vulnerability into your steady gain, allowing the lender to feel virtuous - even “helpful” - while profiting from a trap.

The context matters: Lessing wrote through the long 20th century’s ideological churn, from colonial economies to postwar austerity to late-capitalist financialization. She’d seen how institutions moralize poverty (“begging”) while normalizing predation (“interest”). The aphorism works because it refuses the usual moral bookkeeping. It doesn’t ask you to pity the borrower; it asks you to notice how economics manufactures dignity for the powerful and stigma for the desperate, then calls the whole arrangement “fair.”