"Love may not make the world go round, but I must admit that it makes the ride worthwhile"
About this Quote
Connery’s line is a tuxedoed shrug at the grand promises we like to hang on romance. It starts by puncturing a familiar cliché - love as the engine of history - and replaces it with something more modest, and more believable: love isn’t the mechanism, it’s the meaning we smuggle into the mechanism. The world keeps spinning for indifferent reasons (economics, biology, bad luck), but affection, loyalty, and intimacy change how that motion feels to the person strapped into it.
The phrasing matters. “May not” keeps the tone genial, not bitter; it’s skepticism without scorched earth. Then “I must admit” plays like a confession, as if even a tough-guy persona has to concede a soft truth under cross-examination. Coming from Connery - long marketed as the model of controlled masculinity, equal parts menace and charm - the subtext is a recalibration of what strength looks like. Love isn’t framed as dependence or surrender. It’s framed as value: the thing that justifies enduring the bumps.
Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century celebrity voice that wants to sound worldly rather than starry-eyed. An actor who embodied competence and cool isn’t selling destiny; he’s selling emotional ROI. The metaphor of “the ride” is quietly democratic, too: everyone’s on it, nobody asked to be, and the only real question is what makes the experience tolerable - even, at moments, beautiful.
The phrasing matters. “May not” keeps the tone genial, not bitter; it’s skepticism without scorched earth. Then “I must admit” plays like a confession, as if even a tough-guy persona has to concede a soft truth under cross-examination. Coming from Connery - long marketed as the model of controlled masculinity, equal parts menace and charm - the subtext is a recalibration of what strength looks like. Love isn’t framed as dependence or surrender. It’s framed as value: the thing that justifies enduring the bumps.
Contextually, it fits a late-20th-century celebrity voice that wants to sound worldly rather than starry-eyed. An actor who embodied competence and cool isn’t selling destiny; he’s selling emotional ROI. The metaphor of “the ride” is quietly democratic, too: everyone’s on it, nobody asked to be, and the only real question is what makes the experience tolerable - even, at moments, beautiful.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
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