Wit & Attitude Quote by Richard Savage

Savage goes for the jugular of inherited status: the kind of man he admires “lives to build, not boast,” and the insult that follows is almost gleefully surgical. “A generous race” isn’t about bloodlines so much as what you produce in the world - character, institutions, opportunities, decency. Then comes the dagger: “No tenth transmitter of a foolish face.” The aristocratic obsession with pedigree is reduced to a grotesque relay race where each generation hands down nothing but physiognomy and vanity, a “face” with no mind behind it.

The line works because it weaponizes the language of lineage. “Transmitter” is cold, mechanical, nearly scientific; it strips nobility of romance and turns it into mere reproduction. “Tenth” is doing real work too: Savage isn’t targeting the newly elevated social climber, but the long-entrenched family that has had ample time to justify its place and still hasn’t. If you’re ten generations in and the family’s chief contribution is a recognizable jawline, you’re not a dynasty, you’re a joke.

Context matters: Savage wrote in an age where patronage and rank could decide a writer’s survival. His own biography was tangled in questions of legitimacy and social recognition, so the contempt for empty heredity isn’t abstract moralizing; it’s personal pressure turned into art. The couplet flatters “building” as a civic virtue while quietly demanding accountability from those who’ve mistaken ancestry for achievement.