Life & Wisdom Quote by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

Hope gets framed here not as a motivational accessory but as a last ration. Brown’s line works because it quietly flips the moral burden: the real wrongdoing isn’t failing to “fix” someone’s situation; it’s taking away the one psychological resource that lets them survive it. The phrasing “deprive someone” is doing heavy lifting. Hope isn’t portrayed as a private feeling you either earn or don’t; it’s treated like something other people can withhold through cruelty, cynicism, humiliation, or even “hard truth” delivered without care.

The kicker is the subordinate clause: “it might be all they have.” That “might” isn’t hedging so much as widening the circle. You can’t reliably know who’s hanging on by a thread, so the ethical default becomes restraint: don’t stomp the fragile thing you can’t see. The line also smuggles in a critique of a certain performative realism, the kind that prides itself on being blunt, as if pessimism were intelligence. Brown implies that stripping hope can be an act of vanity, a way for the speaker to feel clear-eyed while leaving the other person with less.

Context matters: Brown built a career on aphorisms designed for mass circulation, the sort of advice that ends up on graduation cards and office walls. That format demands compression, and this one succeeds because it doesn’t promise that hope will solve anything. It only insists that denying it is a harm in itself, especially when someone’s material options have already collapsed.