Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Orben

Temptation, in Robert Orben's hands, isn't a monster to be slain; it's a flirt that people want to keep on speed dial. The line lands because it punctures the polite fiction of self-improvement culture: that we’re all marching, upright and solemn, toward virtue. Orben tweaks the familiar religious phrasing "deliver us from temptation" by adding the modern, almost bureaucratic coda "but would like it to keep in touch". That tonal shift is the joke. It turns moral struggle into relationship management.

The intent is classic Orben: a clean, stage-ready punchline that lets an audience laugh at itself without feeling indicted. The subtext is less about sin than about preference. We don’t just fall into bad habits; we curate them. We want the comfort of claiming discipline while preserving the thrill of possibility. The comedy comes from recognizing the double bookkeeping: publicly we request rescue, privately we request updates.

Context matters here. Orben wrote for an era when mass entertainment was increasingly fluent in the language of confession and self-control, but still needed jokes to be broadly palatable. By framing temptation as something you can "keep in touch" with, he anticipates today's soft-core virtue signaling: the diet that includes "cheat days", the digital detox with push notifications left on, the boundary that still allows late-night texts.

It's a one-liner that works like a mirror: quick, unthreatening, and uncomfortably accurate.