Love Quote by Cole Porter

Porter’s line plays like a tossed-off epigram, but it lands as an indictment. “Most gentlemen” is the sly setup: a word that signals polish, money, manners, and supposedly moral restraint. Then he flips it. These men don’t “like” love; they like the performance of having it near enough to dominate. The verb choice is the knife. To “kick it around” turns romance into a disposable object, something to toy with when bored, to show off with, to bruise without consequence. Love isn’t mutual here; it’s recreational.

The subtext is classic Porter: sophistication with a hard edge, a cocktail of charm and disillusionment. As a composer who lived among the wealthy and the socially powerful - and as a gay man navigating an era when desire was policed and coded - Porter knew how “gentlemanly” ideals could mask appetite, cruelty, and boredom. The line doesn’t merely scold male callousness; it mocks the entire social script that lets men treat emotional intimacy as a sport while still collecting the cultural badge of decency.

Context matters because Porter wrote for worlds where romance was both currency and theater: Broadway, high society, and the witty, brittle milieu of interwar and mid-century America. In that environment, love is routinely staged, traded, and reviewed. This quip works because it compresses a whole sociology into a casual sneer: the refined man as emotional vandal, polishing his reputation while scuffing everyone else’s heart.