Daily Inspiration Quote by Kin Hubbard

Hubbard takes a Sunday School platitude and flips it into a dry little dare. The line leans on the familiarity of "the meek shall inherit the earth" (a beatitude that promises moral reward) and then punctures it with a journalist's suspicion: inheriting is not the same as holding. The joke is that the promised victory arrives not as triumph but as a lease with a short expiration date.

The specific intent is satiric correction. Hubbard isn't attacking meekness as a virtue so much as he is questioning the real-world mechanics of power. "Fun to watch" is the tell: it casts history as a spectator sport, suggesting that the meek, once elevated, will face the same predators, systems, and incentives that crushed them in the first place. The subtext is Darwinian and institutional. Niceness doesn't automatically translate into governance, defense, or the willingness to wield authority. If the meek refuse coercion on principle, who enforces property, borders, laws? If they learn coercion, are they still meek?

Context matters. Hubbard wrote in an America of industrial consolidation, labor unrest, and hard-edged boosterism, where "success" was often framed as proof of merit. As a newspaper humorist, he specialized in commonsense cynicism: a Midwestern voice skeptical of grand moral assurances. The line lands because it exposes a gap between spiritual rhetoric and political reality, and because it smuggles its critique in as entertainment. It laughs at the comforting idea of inevitable justice, then leaves you with the uncomfortable question: if goodness ever gets its turn, will it survive contact with the world it inherits?