Love & Passion Quote by George Ade

A polite proverb gets mugged in an alley and comes out wearing a monocle. George Ade takes the stiff, moralizing Puritan slogan about self-improvement and flips it into a social truth: power doesn’t keep banker’s hours. The joke lands because it’s not just contrarian; it’s observational. “Prominent and influential people” are implied to be creatures of nightlife, backrooms, late dinners, smoke-thick clubs, and the kind of “meetings” that happen after the public day is done. If you’re in bed by nine, you’re not merely virtuous - you’re absent.

Ade’s intent is to puncture the fantasy that success is earned primarily through personal discipline. The subtext is that influence is relational and often transactional: the real work of getting ahead happens in informal spaces where the rules are softer and the record-keeping is conveniently vague. He’s also warning that the popular ladder-climbing advice of the era - get up early, grind, stay clean - is a story told to keep the ambitious manageable. Good citizens wake at dawn; connected citizens close the restaurant.

Context matters. Ade wrote during an America newly infatuated with “making it”: Gilded Age fortunes, boosterism, city machines, and a growing entertainment economy. His line needles both the reformer’s piety and the striver’s naivete. It’s funny because it’s true enough to sting, and cynical because it suggests the social order runs on access, not alarms.