Life & Mortality Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

A neat little guillotine of a sentence: it pretends to praise necessity, then exposes it as a fantasy rich societies can’t afford. Lichtenberg, the Enlightenment scientist with a satirist’s eye, isn’t moralizing about laziness; he’s pointing out the economic perversity that sits under polite talk of “simple living.” If everyone restricted themselves to the strictly necessary, whole industries would evaporate. “Millions would die of hunger” lands as deliberate overkill, but the exaggeration is the point: deprivation wouldn’t be an individual virtue, it would be a systemic shock.

The subtext is that modern prosperity depends on organized excess. Not just luxury goods, but the sprawling apparatus of services, status-signaling, and convenience that keeps people employed. Lichtenberg compresses an uncomfortable truth: consumption isn’t merely appetite; it’s distribution. The baker, tailor, printer, porter, and innkeeper eat because someone else buys more than bare survival requires. “Necessary” sounds like moral clarity, yet it becomes a weapon when scaled up.

Context matters. In late-18th-century Europe, proto-industrial capitalism is accelerating, markets are expanding, and traditional moral economics is colliding with commercial society. As a scientist, Lichtenberg understands systems: small changes in individual behavior can trigger disproportionate collective consequences. As a cynic, he enjoys skewering sanctimony. The line reads today like a preview of debates about austerity, degrowth, and “ethical consumption”: admirable at the level of personal identity, potentially brutal when treated as a blueprint for everyone else.