Happiness Quote by Clare Boothe Luce

Luce twists a sentimental platitude into a stage-worthy punchline, and the laugh catches because it’s edged with truth. “Money can’t buy happiness” is the kind of moral bromide people deploy to sound noble (or to soften envy), but Luce refuses the consolation. She concedes the cliché’s premise, then immediately undercuts its smugness: misery doesn’t vanish with wealth, it just upgrades its amenities.

The specific intent is less to defend materialism than to expose the hypocrisy and bad faith around it. Comfort isn’t joy, but it is power: insulation from consequences, choices on demand, privacy, time. Luce’s “awfully comfortable” is doing cultural work. “Awfully” winks at the paradox (awful comfort), while also mimicking upper-class understatement: even despair can be upholstered. The subtext is that societies love to moralize poverty as character-building while quietly admitting that hardship isn’t a personality trait; it’s an obstacle. If you’re going to be unhappy, you’d rather be unhappy with healthcare, heat, and a door that locks.

Context matters. Luce was a dramatist steeped in elite political and social worlds, writing in an America where the mythology of self-made virtue was colliding with modern consumer life. Her line reads like drawing-room realism: honest about human discontent, sharper about the social theater that surrounds it. It’s not anti-money or pro-money; it’s anti-fantasy. The joke lands because it names what polite culture pretends not to know: money may not deliver meaning, but it can certainly purchase a softer landing when meaning fails.