Love Quote by John Steinbeck

Steinbeck is doing that rare trick: indicting an economic order without letting anyone off the hook. The sentence begins as a personal puzzlement ("strange to me") but quickly reveals itself as an accusation dressed in plain clothes. He sets up a moral ledger - kindness, generosity, openness - then tells you those virtues are not merely unrewarded but structurally penalized: "concomitants of failure". That word choice matters. He isn't describing bad luck or individual weakness; he's naming a system that reliably converts decency into losing.

The second half turns the knife. The traits "we detest" are not accidental blemishes on success; they're its operating equipment. "Sharpness" and "acquisitiveness" are a sanitized vocabulary for predation, the kind a culture can celebrate as "drive". Steinbeck's list-making is deliberate and exhausting, a rhetorical piling-on that mirrors the cumulative grind of capitalism's incentives. You feel the weight of it because it's meant to feel inevitable.

Then comes the real subtext: our complicity is consumer-facing. We admire the saint but "love the produce" of the scoundrel. It's an early diagnosis of what we'd now call ethical dissonance: we want humane people, but we buy outcomes made by inhumane behavior, and we pretend those desires can coexist without cost. Written from a novelist steeped in Depression-era labor politics, the line reads less like a lament than a warning: if a society makes goodness uncompetitive, it will eventually treat goodness as a hobby, not a standard.