Happiness Quote by Samuel Johnson

Johnson doesn’t bother with the sentimental alibi that everyone deserves happiness; he goes straight for the cold utilitarian calculus that keeps hierarchies looking like common sense. The line is built like a provocation: not “inequality happens,” but “inequality is preferable,” because the alternative is a flatland where joy itself gets rationed down to nothing. It’s an argument that turns “general equality” into a kind of emotional famine, a world so committed to sameness that it can’t afford excellence, leisure, or the concentrated pleasures that status supposedly makes possible.

The subtext is doing more work than the syllogism. “Some should be unhappy” is a strangely passive construction, as if misery were weather, not policy. No villains, no victims, just a regrettable necessity. That grammatical shrug is the tell: Johnson is naturalizing social stratification by framing it as the only safeguard against a dull, universal unhappiness. It’s also a preemptive strike against leveling politics, which in the 18th century weren’t abstract; they were anxieties about property, patronage, and the moral authority of ranks.

Context matters: Johnson wrote from a world where “equality” was less a civil-rights promise than a revolutionary threat, and where cultural production (including his own career) was entangled with aristocratic support and class deference. The wit here is austere, almost judicial, but it carries a sharp rhetorical trick: it swaps the scandal. Instead of asking why some must suffer for others to thrive, it asks why anyone would risk everyone’s happiness for the moral vanity of equal outcomes.