Life & Wisdom Quote by Quentin Crisp

Crisp turns morality into physiology: decency isn’t a shining virtue, it’s cardio. The joke lands because it re-frames “being good” as continuous labor rather than a natural posture. In his hands, decency becomes a performance with running costs: vigilance, restraint, tact, the constant micro-editing of impulse. If indecency is the lazy default (or at least the cheaper option), then decency reads as an exhausting act of self-management - and social management, too, since “decency” is rarely private. It’s a public standard, enforced by gossip and gatekeeping, that demands you anticipate what will offend the room.

The subtext is Crisp’s familiar skepticism toward respectability. As an openly gay man who lived through Britain’s mid-century moral policing, he knew “decency” often functioned as a cudgel: less about kindness than about conformity. The line slyly asks: decent according to whom, and at what cost? The people who “succeed” at it, he implies, are either saints or sleepwalking - “stupefying” suggests not restful sleep but a kind of anesthesia. Decency is so taxing you need to numb yourself just to keep up.

There’s also a deliciously barbed inversion: we usually treat indecency as the slippery slope, the thing requiring discipline to resist. Crisp flips that script. The cultural punch is that modern life still runs on this math. Every time we demand perfect manners, perfect politics, perfect apologies, we’re asking for a level of self-surveillance that’s hard to sustain without burnout. Crisp doesn’t absolve indecency; he punctures the fantasy that decency is effortless, and exposes the hidden fatigue behind “good behavior.”