Love Quote by George Farquhar

A knife twist of a line: it borrows the grand, statecraft cliché "money is the sinews of war" and grafts it onto the one realm that pretends to be above accounting. Farquhar, a Restoration and early-18th-century dramatist, knew exactly how to scandalize polite sentiment without sounding like a moral scold. "Sinews" is doing the dirty work here. It’s anatomical, unromantic, almost violent. Love isn’t a pure flame; it’s a body that needs connective tissue, and cash is the tendon that makes it move.

The specific intent is comic realism with a cynical edge. Farquhar isn’t arguing that affection is fake; he’s arguing that affection, like conflict, requires logistics. Courtship costs. Marriage consolidates property. Even desire has overhead: clothes, coach fare, privacy, time bought away from labor. The line exposes how often romantic ideals function as cover stories for economic negotiation, especially in a class-obsessed society where marriages were as much alliances as they were intimacies.

The subtext lands hardest on hypocrisy. People love to speak as if love is spontaneous and war is calculated; Farquhar flips that comfort. War is openly funded; love pretends it isn’t. By making them share a mechanism, he levels both: war becomes just another organized human appetite, and love becomes another arena where power and resources decide outcomes.

Contextually, this comes from a theater culture that fed on manners, money, and marriage plots. The audience would laugh because they recognized the ledger under the lyric - and because the joke indicts them while entertaining them.