Daily Inspiration Quote by Don Marquis

Honesty, Marquis suggests, is less a halo than a hazard: admirable in theory, costly in practice. Coming from a journalist who spent his career watching public virtue get traded like a commodity, the line reads as a dry warning about how institutions actually reward behavior. The pivot is the word "profitable". He frames honesty not as morality but as an asset class, and then undercuts it with the reality that raw truth-telling can tank your social capital, your job prospects, your access. In other words, honesty is only "good" when it’s curated.

"Kept under control" is doing the real work. It implies honesty isn’t a pure impulse; it’s a force that needs management, like anger or appetite. That’s a sly indictment of a culture that demands authenticity but punishes the unfiltered version of it. The ideal citizen is honest on a leash: candid enough to appear trustworthy, restrained enough not to disrupt the hierarchy.

The subtext is especially pointed for a newsroom world of the early 20th century: boosters, politicians, and titans of industry all had narratives to sell, and the press often had to decide whether truth was worth the backlash. Marquis isn’t cheering dishonesty; he’s exposing the transactional nature of "virtue" in public life. His cynicism lands because it doesn’t flatter the reader. It forces a harder question: if honesty needs "control" to pay off, are we valuing truth at all, or just its PR-friendly edit?