Life & Wisdom Quote by Anthony Hope

Anthony Hope’s line is a neat little dagger aimed at the Victorian obsession with respectability. “Good families” doesn’t mean kind families; it means pedigreed ones, stamped as proper by class, manners, and the public performance of virtue. The twist is that this supposedly reassuring label becomes a warning. Hope flips moral branding into moral suspicion: the more a family advertises itself as “good,” the more likely it is guarding rot behind polished silver.

The intent is satirical, but not cartoonish. Hope is pricking a social bubble where reputations are inherited like property, and where the work of appearing correct often outruns the work of being decent. The subtext: “goodness” in a family can function as a club, not a conscience. It produces entitlement (we are above consequence), surveillance (we must maintain appearances), and cruelty disguised as duty (what will people say?). That’s how “good” becomes worse: the stakes of the facade encourage denial, scapegoating, and quiet violence toward anyone who threatens the narrative.

Context matters. Hope wrote in a Britain still structured by rigid class hierarchies and anxious about social mobility. His fiction repeatedly toys with the gap between romantic ideals and the grubby mechanics of status. This aphorism distills that sensibility into a single, cynical equation: the higher the social credit, the stronger the incentive to launder selfishness as tradition. It works because it weaponizes a polite phrase everyone recognizes, then forces you to hear the menace inside it.