"Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed"
About this Quote
Prince Philip’s line lands because it treats a cherished modern wish - “more leisure” - as a monkey’s paw. The first sentence borrows the soothing rhetoric of progress: shorter hours, richer lives, a post-scarcity horizon where work stops being destiny. The second sentence snaps it shut with a single verb: “complaining.” Leisure, he implies, wasn’t really desired as idleness; it was desired as dignity, security, and choice. When leisure arrives as unemployment, it’s not liberation but demotion.
The intent is pointedly conservative in the old royal sense: a suspicion of utopian social talk, and an impatience with public mood swings. Philip frames the public as fickle - demanding a benefit in the abstract, then resenting it in practice. That’s a neat bit of rhetorical trap-setting: he collapses two different conditions (time off with pay versus joblessness) into one word, leisure, and dares you to untangle them without sounding precious.
Context matters. Coming from a figure synonymous with duty, schedules, and institutional continuity, the joke doubles as self-portrait. Work isn’t just economic; it’s moral theater, a way societies distribute status and purpose. In late-20th-century Britain - deindustrialization, labor unrest, rising unemployment - “more leisure” wasn’t a lifestyle trend so much as a euphemism for disruption. Philip’s quip channels that anxiety, mocking the idea that technology or policy can painlessly subtract work without subtracting belonging.
The intent is pointedly conservative in the old royal sense: a suspicion of utopian social talk, and an impatience with public mood swings. Philip frames the public as fickle - demanding a benefit in the abstract, then resenting it in practice. That’s a neat bit of rhetorical trap-setting: he collapses two different conditions (time off with pay versus joblessness) into one word, leisure, and dares you to untangle them without sounding precious.
Context matters. Coming from a figure synonymous with duty, schedules, and institutional continuity, the joke doubles as self-portrait. Work isn’t just economic; it’s moral theater, a way societies distribute status and purpose. In late-20th-century Britain - deindustrialization, labor unrest, rising unemployment - “more leisure” wasn’t a lifestyle trend so much as a euphemism for disruption. Philip’s quip channels that anxiety, mocking the idea that technology or policy can painlessly subtract work without subtracting belonging.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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