Life & Wisdom Quote by Edgar Rice Burroghs

Hope is usually marketed as the one resource you can’t run out of. Burroughs snaps that illusion in half: it’s not suffering, bad odds, or human cruelty that makes hope pointless, but the hard stop of death. The line works because it takes a sentiment often deployed as moral advice and reclassifies it as a physical fact. Everything short of extinction remains negotiable; the universe might be indifferent, but it’s still open for business.

Burroughs, a pulp-era adventure writer, understood suspense as a system of deferred endings. His heroes survive deserts, planets, and empires because the genre depends on one thing: as long as you’re alive, the story can still pivot. Read in that context, the quote isn’t morbid so much as mechanistic. Hope isn’t a virtue here; it’s a narrative engine. It keeps the protagonist moving when logic says stop. That’s why “only” matters. The sentence draws a bright boundary around futility, narrowing it to a single condition. Everything else - betrayal, captivity, even looming catastrophe - becomes merely another obstacle to be outlasted.

The subtext is almost defiant. It refuses to grant despair the dignity of inevitability. You can be crushed, cornered, humiliated, wrong, and still not be entitled to call the game. Burroughs’s intent feels less like consoling wisdom than a writer’s credo: while the character breathes, the reader should, too.