Daily Inspiration Quote by George Jean Nathan

Nathan’s line lands like a compliment with a trapdoor: “worth his salt” sounds like praise, but it’s immediately tied to a moral indictment. Anyone truly competent “in any direction,” he claims, is also reliably self-centered. The bite is in that pairing. He’s not just calling people selfish; he’s reframing selfishness as the price of admission to seriousness.

As an editor and critic who moved through Broadway glitter and American boosterism, Nathan specialized in puncturing the public’s feel-good myths. The subtext here is an attack on the sentimental idea that greatness is born from purity, altruism, or civic virtue. He suggests the opposite: ambition, vanity, and self-regard aren’t corruptions of talent, they’re its fuel. “First and foremost” is doing heavy lifting; it doesn’t mean someone can’t care about others, only that the internal hierarchy is fixed. The self comes first, everything else negotiates for second place.

The phrase “I have yet to find” gives him a reporter’s posture, as if this is empirical wisdom gathered from the field rather than a cynical flourish. That’s part of why it works: Nathan sells a prejudice as observation. Read in context, it’s also an editor’s confession. To edit is to judge, to impose taste, to believe your discernment matters. Nathan’s worldview flatters the striver while scorning the moralist, insisting that the people who build, write, lead, or perform are rarely saints - and that pretending otherwise is the real dishonesty.