Daily Inspiration Quote by Ann Landers

A gossip-column priestess of midcentury manners, Ann Landers smuggles an ethical manifesto into the plainest possible sentence. The brilliance is its bait-and-switch: it sounds like homespun advice, then quietly detonates our favorite self-image. Most people grade their own character by the moments when they are being observed, rewarded, or admired. Landers redirects the camera to the scene with no audience and no payoff.

The line hinges on a cold little phrase: "absolutely no good". Not "little good" or "not much use" but zero utility. She’s naming a transaction model of human behavior - the reflex to be decent only when decency returns a dividend. In that light, kindness becomes a diagnostic tool. How you treat the powerless is not just about generosity; it’s a stress test for whether you see other people as ends in themselves or as props in your personal economy.

Landers wrote in a culture that pretended etiquette was apolitical, even as class, race, gender, and domestic power dynamics ran through every letter. Her columns were mass-market moral arbitration: what you owe your spouse, your neighbor, the waitress, your kid. This quote is etiquette stripped down to its moral core. It also reads as a warning about performative virtue, long before the internet made virtue legible as brand. If your decency vanishes when the incentives do, Landers implies, it was never decency - it was strategy.