Life & Wisdom Quote by John C. Ransom

Ransom’s “we” lands like a guilty verdict delivered in the first-person plural: no scapegoats, no comforting distance, just a brisk indictment of modern temperament. “Impatient” is the hinge word. It suggests not simply speed but a moral posture - a refusal to dwell, to apprentice ourselves to difficulty, to accept limits. From there, “destructive” follows less as an insult than as a diagnosis: when a culture can’t tolerate slowness, ambiguity, or inheritance, it starts clearing the ground. Tradition becomes clutter. Nuance becomes inefficiency. The past becomes an obstacle course we bulldoze so we can call the new “progress.”

Ransom’s context matters. As a leading figure tied to the Southern Agrarians, he was writing against early 20th-century industrial modernity and its confidence that technology, rational planning, and economic throughput could replace older forms of meaning. The line isn’t nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake; it’s a warning about a specific kind of modern power: the ability to remake the world faster than we can decide what it’s for. That’s why the sentence is so bare. No ornament, no alibi - just two adjectives and a collective subject.

The subtext is almost ethical: impatience is the emotional fuel; destruction is the consequence. In Ransom’s view, modernity doesn’t merely change things - it tends to treat what it didn’t invent as disposable. The sting is that he includes himself. The critique isn’t performative purity; it’s complicity acknowledged, and that makes it harder to dismiss.