Life & Wisdom Quote by Carl Sandburg

Sandburg takes a Sunday-school commandment and snaps it shut like a pocketknife. "Love your neighbor as yourself" is pure moral uplift; "but don't take down the fence" is the American addendum, where goodwill is real right up until it threatens property lines. The joke lands because it isn’t anti-love, it’s anti-sentimentality: it exposes how quickly our proclaimed generosity becomes conditional once it bumps into the practical architecture of control.

The fence does triple duty. It’s literal (land, privacy, the small sovereignties of the yard) and symbolic (class boundaries, racial lines, the invisible rules about who gets to feel at home where). Sandburg’s pivot makes neighborliness sound less like an ethic and more like a negotiated truce. You can share sugar, exchange pleasantries, even mean it - but the border stays, because the border is where power lives.

Context matters: Sandburg wrote out of an America industrializing fast, urbanizing faster, and learning to romanticize itself as communal while practicing a vigilant individualism. In that landscape, "neighbor" is a charged term - not just the person next door, but the immigrant, the worker, the stranger moving into a block that thought it was settled. The line captures a national habit of moral branding: we advertise decency, then install a boundary to keep decency from getting inconvenient. It’s funny because it’s true, and it stings because it’s still policy, HOA bylaws, and social etiquette dressed up as virtue.