Life & Wisdom Quote by Ogden Nash

Nash pins a tidy little dart to one of society's favorite coping mechanisms: the moralization of luck. The line sounds like a throwaway joke, but its target is sharp: comfort loves to disguise itself as wisdom. When people "have what they want", they gain not just the thing but a narrative that keeps it feeling earned, stable, even virtuous. Telling the have-nots that they "really don't want it" is less advice than self-defense, a way to quiet the uncomfortable possibility that desire is rational, deprivation is real, and the world isn't arranged by merit.

The brilliance is in the reversal of authority. The person with the prize is presumed to have insight; Nash suggests they're often the least trustworthy witness. Wanting is treated like a childish phase you outgrow once you've arrived. But that's precisely when you have the most incentive to redefine the want as overrated, corrupting, or not worth the trouble, because that reframing absolves you from sharing it, questioning how you got it, or admitting how arbitrary the distribution can be.

Context matters: Nash wrote in a 20th-century America increasingly fluent in the language of self-help, status, and polite class management. His comic understatement exposes a genteel cruelty common in upwardly mobile cultures: the soft-spoken dismissal that keeps inequality from sounding like a problem. It's not cynicism for its own sake; it's a warning about how easily empathy is replaced by rationalization when your needs are already met.