Daily Inspiration Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley turns the Protestant work ethic into a three-beat joke, and the joke is doing ideological work. The line is structured like a tidy little sermon - creation, compensation, moral self-audit - but delivered with a vulgar punchline that yanks the whole thing back to earth. That last clause ("sitting on my ass") isn’t just comic grit; it’s a deliberate sabotage of pretension, a way for a famously patrician voice to prove he can still talk like an annoyed human being. The phrasing suggests he knows exactly how his public persona reads: elegant, overeducated, possibly smug. So he undercuts it preemptively.

The intent is also practical: to normalize productivity as its own reward without sounding pious. Buckley doesn’t pretend he’s an artist above money, nor does he pretend money is enough. He stacks satisfactions to admit the messy truth of professional creative life: you want to make something good, you want your labor validated in cash, and you want the private relief of not wasting your day. That third satisfaction is the real tell. It’s not about legacy or beauty; it’s about guilt management - the internal accountant tallying hours.

Context matters: Buckley was a hyper-visible journalist-entrepreneur, turning opinion into an industry across columns, books, and television. This is the voice of someone who lives by output, who treats idleness as a moral hazard, and who wraps that discipline in a wisecrack so it lands as charm, not catechism.