Life & Mortality Quote by Charles Evans Hughes

Hughes’s line lands like a judicial opinion disguised as a proverb: calm, clipped, and quietly accusatory. It takes a popular villain of modern life, “overwork,” and acquits it, redirecting blame to two less respectable culprits. “Dissipation” isn’t just leisure; it’s the morally loaded kind - drinking, gambling, late nights, the erosions of routine that Progressive-era reformers loved to police. Pair it with “worry,” and Hughes stitches together vice and anxiety as the real killers, suggesting that the body can withstand long hours better than it can withstand a life lived raggedly or fearfully.

The intent is almost managerial. If overwork doesn’t kill you, then the ethic of strenuous effort stays intact; what needs correction is character and temperament. Coming from a judge - and a public figure steeped in the era’s faith in self-control and institutional order - the quote reads as social instruction. Work is framed as disciplined, even ennobling; dissipation is waste, a leak in the system.

The subtext is also a subtle defense of the professional class that benefits from heroic narratives of labor. Saying people “die from dissipation and worry” shifts the conversation away from working conditions, exploitation, and structural strain and toward personal habits and interior life. It’s a neat rhetorical move: it turns the socioeconomic question of “too much work” into the moral-psychological question of “what kind of person are you when you’re not working?” In that sense, it’s less a medical claim than a cultural verdict.