Motivation Quote by Gene Tunney

Tunney lands the punch by pretending to accept a cold premise, then letting it detonate. “If all human lives depended upon their usefulness” reads like the opening clause of a spreadsheet-brained worldview: value equals output, worth equals measurable contribution. The parenthetical “as might be judged by certain standards” is the sly feint. He’s not disputing usefulness; he’s questioning who gets to set the yardstick, and how quickly those “certain standards” get weaponized.

The sting is in “sudden and terrific mortality.” It’s darkly comic, almost tabloid phrasing, because it forces you to picture the logical endpoint of meritocratic absolutism: a mass culling not by plague or war, but by evaluation. Tunney is sketching an ethical horror that sounds uncomfortably administrative. The subtext is that societies routinely flirt with this idea in softer language - efficiency, productivity, optimization - and that the violence is often hidden behind supposedly neutral criteria.

Coming from an athlete, the line carries extra bite. Sport is the arena where usefulness is blunt and quantified: wins, losses, time, endurance, the body as instrument. Tunney, a heavyweight champion who moved in intellectual circles and served in public life, understood both the seduction and cruelty of performance metrics. His intent isn’t to romanticize “unuseful” lives; it’s to warn that when you treat human beings like roster spots, you eventually start cutting the wrong things: the sick, the old, the unlucky, the merely ordinary. The quote works because it’s a moral argument disguised as a pragmatic forecast, delivered with the athlete’s sense of consequence: one rule change, and the whole game turns lethal.