Wit & Attitude Quote by Emma Thompson

Thompson is puncturing a comforting myth: that poverty is a lifestyle choice cushioned by idleness. Her language is deliberately plain and bodily - dawn until dusk, survive through the day - because she is fighting an abstraction with stamina, time, and exhaustion. Poverty gets sold as a moral failure; she drags it back into the realm of schedules, sore feet, and relentless trade-offs.

The intent is corrective, but the subtext is accusatory. "I don't think people understand" sounds gentle, almost charitable, yet it functions as an indictment of a culture that treats misunderstanding as innocence. The second sentence reveals the real target: the lazy-poor stereotype that props up punitive policies and casual cruelty. If the poor are imagined "lying about", then low wages become deserved, benefits become "handouts", and empathy becomes optional.

As an actress and public figure, Thompson is also leveraging a specific kind of credibility: not expertise in economics, but fluency in narrative. She knows how stories work, and she is naming the stock character society keeps casting - the fraud, the scrounger - while insisting on a different plotline where the protagonist is overworked and still losing. The phrase "some notion" hints at how these ideas travel: not as carefully argued beliefs, but as ambient common sense absorbed from tabloids, talk radio, and political rhetoric.

It lands because it reframes poverty from a question of character to a question of time. If every hour is already spent, the usual advice - hustle, upskill, work harder - collapses into satire.