"I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds"
About this Quote
Crisp’s line lands like a perfume-spritzed pin: elegant, amused, and quietly devastating to religious sentimentalism. He takes the grandest imaginable scale - a cosmic clockwork that “keeps the planets revolving” - and crashes it into the petty logistics of human want: a three-speed bicycle, not even a Cadillac. The disproportion is the joke, but it’s also the argument. If you believe in an ordering intelligence vast enough to choreograph galaxies, asking it to pause for your consumer-grade convenience starts to look less like faith and more like vanity.
The phrasing matters. “I simply haven’t the nerve” flips the usual posture of piety. Crisp frames unbelief not as arrogance or cynicism, but as modesty: he can’t bring himself to presume he’s important enough to warrant divine customer service. That turn is pure Crisp - camp as ethical stance, wit as a defense against coercive seriousness.
Context sharpens the subtext. Crisp spent his life as an openly gay Englishman through decades when society, law, and medicine treated that identity as a problem to be corrected. In that world, “God” often arrives as an instrument of social discipline: pray, conform, be fixed. His skepticism targets not only metaphysics but the small, transactional theology that underwrites respectability culture: be good, get rewarded; suffer, get meaning.
By choosing something so homely and specific, he punctures the habit of dressing personal desire in cosmic language. The punchline isn’t atheism as posture; it’s a refusal to flatter the self.
The phrasing matters. “I simply haven’t the nerve” flips the usual posture of piety. Crisp frames unbelief not as arrogance or cynicism, but as modesty: he can’t bring himself to presume he’s important enough to warrant divine customer service. That turn is pure Crisp - camp as ethical stance, wit as a defense against coercive seriousness.
Context sharpens the subtext. Crisp spent his life as an openly gay Englishman through decades when society, law, and medicine treated that identity as a problem to be corrected. In that world, “God” often arrives as an instrument of social discipline: pray, conform, be fixed. His skepticism targets not only metaphysics but the small, transactional theology that underwrites respectability culture: be good, get rewarded; suffer, get meaning.
By choosing something so homely and specific, he punctures the habit of dressing personal desire in cosmic language. The punchline isn’t atheism as posture; it’s a refusal to flatter the self.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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