Life & Wisdom Quote by Ogden Nash

Nash turns devotion into a wink. "I claim there ain't Another Saint As great as Valentine" reads like a valentine that knows it’s a valentine: earnest enough to be sweet, slippery enough to dodge sentimentality. The capital letters (Another, Saint, As, Valentine) mimic the mock-solemn typography of hymns or proclamations, then undercut that dignity with the plainspoken "ain't" and the chesty, almost courtroom "I claim". He’s staging a miniature argument for a cause that’s obviously biased: the speaker is already in love, already campaigning.

The intent is not theological ranking; it’s cultural satire. Valentine’s Day is a holiday that piggybacks on sainthood while functioning as a consumer ritual of cards, candy, and sanctioned romance. Nash spotlights the mismatch and makes it charming instead of cynical. By treating Valentine as "great" in the same register we’d reserve for Francis or Augustine, he exposes how modern life repurposes sacred language to authorize private desire. The joke works because it’s a little indecent: love, in this framing, doesn’t just inspire; it appoints.

Context matters. Nash wrote in a mid-century America where greeting-card verse and mass-market holidays were booming, and his signature light rhyme functioned as a pressure valve against cultural earnestness. The subtext is affectionate suspicion: romance is powerful, but the stories we tell about it are theatrical. Nash isn’t mocking love; he’s mocking the pieties we wrap around it so we can take ourselves seriously while we flirt.