Life & Wisdom Quote by Quentin Crisp

A lot of self-help advice flatters you into thinking the race is worth running. Quentin Crisp flips the whole treadmill over, then smirks at the people still jogging. "Never keep up with the Joneses" is the familiar moral about status anxiety; the second sentence is the sting: don't just opt out of the game, sabotage its pretensions. The joke works because it’s brazenly antisocial while also feeling like self-defense. Crisp isn’t offering a blueprint for cruelty so much as puncturing the pieties around "aspiration" and "respectability."

Read in context of Crisp's life, the line lands as gay survival humor sharpened into a worldview. He spent decades as an unapologetic outsider in mid-century Britain, a period when conformity was enforced not only by snobbery but by law and violence. When society is built to exclude you, "keeping up" becomes a rigged contest; refusing the terms is rational. "Drag them down" is not literally a call to harm your neighbors as much as a refusal to grant them moral authority. It’s the revenge fantasy of someone who has been told, repeatedly, that his level is shameful.

The subtext is also Crisp's signature: camp as critique. He uses exaggeration to expose how petty the Joneses are, how flimsy their superiority looks when you stop treating it as natural. It’s cynicism with a liberating edge: if status is a costume party, you can decline the invitation, or you can heckle the costumes.