Life & Wisdom Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Thinking here isn’t a genteel parlor activity; it’s self-defense. Fitzgerald frames the choice in blunt, almost gangsterish terms: either you do the hard, private work of judgment, or someone else will happily do it on your behalf and invoice you in autonomy. The sentence moves like a tightening noose. “Take power” is the overt theft, but the real menace arrives in the softer verbs: “pervert,” “discipline,” “civilize,” “sterilize.” That sequence is a miniature history of social control - how institutions rarely announce themselves as tyrants, preferring the language of improvement. You won’t be crushed, you’ll be refined.

The subtext feels especially Fitzgeraldian: a writer who chronicled glamour as a kind of trap, alert to how status systems teach people to desire what flatters the system. “Natural tastes” is doing sly work. It’s not a romantic plea to stay primitive; it’s a warning that preference is political. What you call taste can be trained, shamed, upgraded, corrected - until your appetites match whatever keeps you compliant. “Civilize” is used with a raised eyebrow, paired with “sterilize” to expose the hidden cost of becoming “proper”: a cleaned-up self that is also a diminished one.

In Fitzgerald’s era - mass advertising, booming consumer culture, the social machinery of class - thinking becomes the last private property. Without it, you don’t just lose opinions; you lose the ability to recognize when your life has been curated by someone else’s interests.