Daily Inspiration Quote by George S. Kaufman

A one-liner like this is Kaufman at full efficiency: a bureaucratic absurdity compressed into a sentence that sounds perfectly normal until your brain catches up. “Office hours are from 12 to 1” already suggests a workplace doing the bare minimum, the kind of institution that performs accessibility rather than providing it. Then comes the knife twist: “with an hour off for lunch.” The office is technically “open” during a window that is immediately nullified. It’s not just that nobody will help you; it’s that the system has learned to weaponize scheduling language so the refusal arrives dressed as policy.

The intent is comic, but the target is serious: institutional self-protection. Kaufman’s theater-world ear for dialogue matters here. This is the voice of the sign on the door, the receptionist, the memo - impersonal, upbeat, final. The joke works because it mimics official phrasing so cleanly. There’s no villain twirling a mustache, just a sentence that absolves everyone involved. You can almost hear the shrug behind it.

Contextually, Kaufman wrote in an era when modern office culture and managerial procedure were consolidating into a national style: hours, forms, rules that look rational on paper while producing irrational outcomes in life. The line lands because it captures a familiar civic experience: the feeling that you didn’t fail to navigate the system; the system was designed to ensure you couldn’t.