"Man is the only animal whose desires increase as they are fed; the only animal that is never satisfied"
About this Quote
Henry George lands the knife with zoological calm: we are the one species that turns nourishment into appetite. The line works because it flatters no one. It swaps the soothing story of “progress” for a more disquieting engine - desire that compounds. Feed it and it doesn’t quiet down; it learns new hungers. That’s not just a bleak view of human nature. It’s a diagnosis of an economic system that converts growth into a treadmill.
George was writing in the Gilded Age, when industrial expansion and urban wealth sat beside grinding poverty and land speculation. His signature puzzle - why do wages stay low as a society gets richer? - is hiding inside this aphorism. If human wants are structurally “never satisfied,” then production alone can’t deliver justice. In fact, rising productivity can widen the chase: new comforts become baseline expectations, and status competition makes abundance feel like scarcity.
The subtext is moral without sounding pious. George isn’t scolding individuals for wanting nicer things; he’s pointing at the social rules that let a few monetize everyone else’s striving. Desire becomes politically dangerous when it meets monopoly - especially land, which George saw as the original bottleneck. If appetites keep expanding, whoever controls the platform of life (the ground under your feet) can skim the gains forever.
Read now, it doubles as a critique of consumer culture and “endless growth” ideology. The line’s bite is that it makes dissatisfaction not a personal failure but a predictable feature of modern life - one that demands structural answers, not self-help.
George was writing in the Gilded Age, when industrial expansion and urban wealth sat beside grinding poverty and land speculation. His signature puzzle - why do wages stay low as a society gets richer? - is hiding inside this aphorism. If human wants are structurally “never satisfied,” then production alone can’t deliver justice. In fact, rising productivity can widen the chase: new comforts become baseline expectations, and status competition makes abundance feel like scarcity.
The subtext is moral without sounding pious. George isn’t scolding individuals for wanting nicer things; he’s pointing at the social rules that let a few monetize everyone else’s striving. Desire becomes politically dangerous when it meets monopoly - especially land, which George saw as the original bottleneck. If appetites keep expanding, whoever controls the platform of life (the ground under your feet) can skim the gains forever.
Read now, it doubles as a critique of consumer culture and “endless growth” ideology. The line’s bite is that it makes dissatisfaction not a personal failure but a predictable feature of modern life - one that demands structural answers, not self-help.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|
More Quotes by Henry
Add to List
