Life & Wisdom Quote by Dave Barry

Dave Barry’s line lands because it refuses to dignify a certain kind of “spiritual conversation” with the label conversation at all. The joke is built on an asymmetry: the people most eager to “share” are often the least interested in exchange. Barry uses the soft, polite verb share to expose how frequently it’s code for persuade, recruit, or win. The humor comes from the gap between the social script (mutual openness, respectful curiosity) and the real power dynamic (one person performing benevolent certainty while the other is cast as an audience).

The phrasing “almost never” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not an absolutist dunk on faith; it’s a wink at a recognizable pattern. Barry’s target isn’t religion as a private practice but proselytizing as a social tactic - especially in a culture where religion is publicly celebrated yet disagreement is treated as rudeness. If you can frame your pitch as generosity (“I’m sharing something important”), you also get to frame resistance as hostility or closed-mindedness. That’s the trap Barry is pointing at.

Context matters: Barry writes from late-20th-century American life, where religious identity can double as community, politics, and moral branding. The line reads like a survival tip for pluralism: real dialogue requires the risk of being changed. If someone can’t tolerate reciprocity, they’re not offering communion; they’re offering conversion.