Life & Wisdom Quote by Preston Sturges

The joke lands because it treats bureaucracy as a kind of petty omniscience: not evil enough to be tragic, just competent enough to be maddening. By comparing "they" to the I.R.S., Sturges grabs an institution that already lives in the American imagination as faceless, rule-bound, and strangely intimate. Taxes are personal, but the system processing them is not; that mismatch is the comic engine. "You move once" is a tiny, ordinary act of self-determination, and the punishment is absurdly disproportionate: a missing refund check, the money you feel the government owes you. In one sentence, freedom becomes paperwork.

Sturges is writing from the era when modern American administration was becoming a daily presence: the New Deal state, wartime mobilization, and the growing expectation that life runs through forms and addresses and file drawers. His comedies thrive on that pressure. The subtext is less "the IRS is annoying" and more "systems remember you in the most inconvenient ways". They lose the human thread (your new address, your actual life) but retain the power to withhold what you need.

The rhythm matters, too: "I suppose" feigns mildness, as if the speaker is trying to be reasonable, then the punchline snaps into place with "never". Sturges' cynicism is genial but pointed: institutions don't have to chase you; they just have to wait, and you'll come looking for what's missing.