Daily Inspiration Quote by Van Wyck Brooks

Brooks lands a rhetorical punch on the fashionable pessimism that shadows every era that thinks it has discovered “human nature” and found it wanting. The line is framed as a practical question, not a sermon, and that’s the point: cynicism collapses under the weight of everyday effort. If people are “basically evil,” why do reform movements keep resurfacing, why do teachers keep teaching, why do artists keep making? Brooks turns moral diagnosis into a test of motivation. A bleak anthropology doesn’t just describe the world; it licenses withdrawal from it.

The subtext is aimed at a particular intellectual posture: the critic who prides himself on disillusionment. Brooks, himself a critic, is warning his own tribe that describing society as irredeemable can become an alibi for doing nothing. “Bad job” is the key phrase. It drags lofty fatalism down to the language of labor and resignation, as if giving up on humanity is just quitting a tedious shift. Improvement, in this framing, isn’t a naive belief that people are angels; it’s an observable habit of persistence that contradicts the “basically evil” thesis.

Context matters: Brooks came of age in the Progressive Era and wrote through war, depression, and ideological hardening. He knew how tempting it is to retreat into cultural despair when institutions fail. His sentence argues that whatever else humans are, they are also the kind of creatures who keep trying to renovate the house they live in. The question isn’t whether evil exists; it’s whether cynicism deserves the final word.