Daily Inspiration Quote by Kin Hubbard

Adversity, Kin Hubbard suggests, is the devil we know; prosperity is the devil we pretend we deserve. The line lands because it’s built like a compliment that turns into a jab. “I’ll say this for adversity” opens with the tone of a begrudging toast, as if hardship has at least earned one decent word. Then Hubbard flips the social script: people can “stand” misfortune, but prosperity makes them wobble. It’s a quiet indictment of how quickly comfort turns into entitlement, boredom, or moral slippage.

The subtext is less self-help than social diagnosis. Adversity forces rituals of endurance: shared norms, thrift, cooperation, humility imposed by circumstance. Prosperity, by contrast, removes the guardrails. When the pantry’s full and the future looks guaranteed, character gets tested in subtler ways: how you treat others when you don’t need them, whether you can resist turning abundance into a personality, whether you can handle choice without dissolving into excess. Hubbard’s “that’s more than I can say” implies prosperity isn’t merely harder, it’s actively corrosive, a kind of soft disaster.

Context matters: Hubbard wrote in an America bouncing between boom-and-bust cycles, where new mass consumer culture sold comfort as destiny. As a journalist-humorist, he’s puncturing the era’s optimism with Midwestern deadpan. The irony isn’t that suffering is good; it’s that success can be the more revealing failure.