Life & Wisdom Quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald’s line lands like a cocktail-party confession: everyone, no matter how compromised, keeps a private alibi of goodness. The verb “suspects” is the sly masterstroke. Virtue isn’t claimed or cultivated; it’s treated like incriminating evidence you might accidentally possess. Fitzgerald takes the language of guilt and flips it into self-flattery, implying that our moral self-image is less a mirror than a defense attorney.

The “cardinal virtues” (classically prudence, justice, temperance, courage) carry an old-world, almost churchy authority, which makes the punchline sharper. By invoking a formal moral taxonomy, Fitzgerald heightens the absurdity of how casually people award themselves membership. You don’t need to be just; you just need to feel, at some point, like the kind of person who could be just. It’s morality as vibe.

In Fitzgerald’s cultural moment - an America drunk on reinvention, status, and performance - this reads as social anthropology. The Jazz Age wasn’t short on charm, money, or spectacle; it was short on stable moral narratives. So people improvise. They “suspect” themselves of courage because they once took a risk, or temperance because they occasionally stop. The subtext is brutal: self-knowledge is negotiable, and goodness is often a story we tell to keep enjoying the party.

It’s also quietly democratic in its indictment. Fitzgerald isn’t only mocking elites; he’s diagnosing a common human mechanism: we all need one clean corner of the self to point to, especially when the rest of the room is a mess.