Life & Wisdom Quote by Richard Armour

Armour takes the grand, clinical-sounding category of "all of the hang-ups known" and punctures it with a switchblade pun: the worst hang-up is the literal one, the telephone. The joke works because it flatters our self-seriousness for half a beat. We brace for a confession about neurosis, shame, maybe Freud. Instead we get a piece of everyday machinery yanking the whole conversation back to the mundane. It is wit as relief valve.

The subtext is sharper than the wordplay. Armour is quietly mocking a culture that romanticizes suffering and overnames its anxieties. By treating hang-ups like a collector's set, he makes psychological distress sound like something you can catalog, compare, and brag about. Then the phone arrives as the real villain: not an inner demon but a social demand. Telephones don't just connect; they interrupt, insist, and force performance in real time. You can't edit a phone call. You can't pretend you didn't receive it. For many people, that's more terrifying than any abstract "issue."

Context matters: Armour is writing from a mid-century world where the telephone had become a domestic fixture and, with it, a new kind of obligation. The line anticipates a very modern dread: the anxiety of being reachable. It's a pre-smartphone complaint with the same core fear - that other people can knock on the door of your attention whenever they want, and you're expected to answer like a competent, coherent person on demand.