Daily Inspiration Quote by Don Marquis

Marquis flips a cozy proverb into a sly social x-ray. "It takes all sorts of people to make the world" is the line you use to smooth over human messiness, to bless diversity with a shrug. Swap in "underworld" and the shrug turns into an accusation: the machinery of vice, corruption, and exploitation is not staffed by a single villain type but by a whole ecology of respectable and disreputable roles. The joke lands because it keeps the sing-song cadence of the original while poisoning its moral optimism.

The intent is less to romanticize criminality than to puncture the fantasy that the "underworld" is a separate country with its own passport control. Marquis, a journalist with a satirist's ear, is pointing at complicity: the fence needs the burglar, sure, but the burglar also needs the credulous buyer, the crooked cop, the politician who looks away, the editor who soft-pedals, the citizen who enjoys the benefits of a dirty system while condemning it in public. "All sorts" becomes a roll call of interconnected incentives.

The subtext is that society likes its evils quarantined, conveniently labeled, and safely othered. By framing the underworld as something collectively "made", Marquis shifts attention from individual moral failure to networks and supply chains: who profits, who enables, who launders legitimacy. In an era of Prohibition, machine politics, and tabloid-fueled public moralizing, the line reads like a newsman’s wink and warning: the underworld isn't beneath us; it's threaded through us, assembled by everyday appetites dressed up as distance.