Leadership Quote by S. I. Hayakawa

There is a whole postwar American bargain packed into that punchline: abundance, speed, and a quiet dread that the system built to deliver your lunch can also swallow you in paperwork. Hayakawa’s “with relish” lands as deliberate double-duty wordplay - a condiment joke that also signals pleasure in saying the unsayable. He isn’t just asking for a hamburger. He’s asking for normal life without the adversarial fine print.

As a politician (and a onetime president of San Francisco State in an era of protest and institutional distrust), Hayakawa would have understood how quickly public life turns into procedure: rules, grievances, hearings, liability. “Hold the lawsuit” frames litigation like an unwanted topping, something that has become so routine it can be ordered. That’s the sting. The line assumes a culture where suing is common enough to be a reflexive punchline - and where consumer transactions feel legally booby-trapped.

The intent reads as a compact piece of conservative populism without sloganeering: an impatience with what people call “a litigious society,” plus a nostalgia for straightforward accountability (you bought a burger, you ate it, nobody called a lawyer). It works because it treats a serious civic anxiety as fast-food banter, shrinking a complicated critique - tort culture, corporate risk management, distrust between citizens - into a single, perfectly American transaction. The joke flatters the listener’s fatigue: you, too, just want lunch, not a case number.