Love & Passion Quote by Harold Pinter

Pinter’s joke lands because it’s rigged like one of his plays: a polite premise, an abrupt escalation, then the sly little aftershock that makes you wonder who’s really in control. Calling cricket “the greatest thing that God ever created” is a mock-sermon, puffing up a very English pastime to the scale of theology. It’s not just exaggeration; it’s a send-up of the national instinct to treat tradition as sacred simply because it’s old, ritualized, and draped in manners.

Then he swerves into the blasphemous comparison that turns reverence into farce: “certainly greater than sex.” The line punctures the usual hierarchy of pleasures and exposes a cultural tell. Cricket isn’t being praised for thrill so much as for structure: its drawn-out duration, its codes, its slow suspense. In other words, it flatters the kind of desire that can be disciplined, deferred, made social. Sex, by contrast, is the unruly appetite modern life keeps dragging into the open.

The final clause, “although sex isn’t too bad either,” is the Pinter touch that keeps the speaker from becoming a zealot. He backpedals just enough to sound like a gentleman returning your coat after insulting you. Subtext: the speaker wants the authority of seriousness without paying the cost of sincerity. Contextually, it’s also a neat snapshot of postwar British masculinity: devotion to institutions and games as a safe language for longing, intimacy, and competitive power, with innuendo doing the emotional heavy lifting.