Love Quote by Charles MacArthur

“Men of vision” lands like a toast, then MacArthur immediately yanks the champagne flute away. The line performs its own dissection: first, the grand label we’re trained to admire, then the brisk exposure of what that label is doing. “Fine names” aren’t neutral descriptors here; they’re camouflage. MacArthur’s ear for stage dialogue turns a sociological critique into a punchline, the kind that makes an audience laugh and then feel implicated for laughing.

The intent is to puncture a particularly American style of hero-making: calling ambition “vision,” conquest “enterprise,” risk-taking “adventure.” Those words flatter the speaker and absolve the subject. By framing greed and lust as things that need hiding, MacArthur suggests they’re not merely private vices but socially managed ones. The group colludes in the makeover. Men “give each other” these names, building a mutual protection racket of praise.

The subtext is also gendered and theatrical. “Men of vision” evokes boardrooms, newsrooms, war rooms - male spaces where power recasts itself as destiny. “Lust for adventure” is especially sharp: it’s desire dressed up as nobility, the restless appetite that drives empires, markets, and midlife reinventions alike. MacArthur, writing in an era when boosters sold modernity as moral progress, points to the marketing of masculinity: the way romance, patriotism, and innovation can all be conscripted to launder self-interest.

It works because it doesn’t argue; it sneers with precision. The sarcasm is the evidence.