Life & Wisdom Quote by Elbert Hubbard

Efficiency sounds like a virtue until you watch it in motion: cutting people off mid-sentence, tightening deadlines, trimming “unnecessary” niceties. Hubbard’s line pins that discomfort with a neat, barbed symmetry. “Pretty hard” softens the blow just enough to feel conversational, but the logic is merciless: real efficiency tends to violate the social rituals that make us feel respected. The joke lands because it’s true in a way we’d rather not admit.

Hubbard was a writer-entrepreneur steeped in early 20th-century American productivity gospel, when industrial management and self-improvement literature sold the promise that life could be optimized. Against that backdrop, the quote reads less like anti-efficiency whining and more like a warning label. You can streamline a process; you can’t streamline human dignity without consequences. “Obnoxious” is doing serious work here: not “rude,” not “cold,” but actively irritating, the kind of personality that treats other people as friction.

The subtext is an ethical dilemma disguised as a quip. To be efficient often means enforcing standards, making fast decisions, and refusing detours into emotion or consensus. Those moves may be necessary, but they trigger resentment because they redistribute power: efficiency typically benefits the person holding the stopwatch. Hubbard isn’t letting inefficiency off the hook; he’s puncturing the fantasy that speed and pleasantness naturally align. If you want results, he implies, you’ll need either thicker skin or better manners than the system encourages.