Life & Wisdom Quote by John Gay

Predators don’t usually do potlucks. That’s the barb John Gay slips under the ribs of “civil society”: the unsettling idea that what makes humans exceptional isn’t our conscience but our coordination. Lions and wolves may hunt, but they don’t build a moral vocabulary around the hunt. Humans do both at once: we take from one another and then invent etiquette, law, and ceremony to make the taking feel orderly, even virtuous.

Gay, a poet of the Augustan age and a close cousin to Swift and Pope in temperament, writes with the period’s polished cynicism. The sentence is built like a syllogism in a powdered wig: premise (predators don’t flock), exception (man does), punchline (and still preys). The elegance matters. By adopting the cool tone of natural history, he smuggles in a social indictment that lands harder because it refuses melodrama. The rhetoric also flips the Enlightenment brag - that sociability equals progress - into an accusation. Our “herding” isn’t proof of harmony; it’s a strategy for more efficient exploitation.

The subtext is class and commerce. Gay wrote in a London thick with financial speculation, party politics, and a growing market culture where people learned to treat neighbors as instruments: customers, rivals, patrons, prey. “Sociable” here is not a compliment; it’s a diagnosis of how predators scale. The line anticipates modern discomfort with institutions that promise community while quietly rewarding predation. We aren’t better than beasts because we gather. We’re worse because we can call it civilization.