"Some have greatness thrust upon them, but not lately"
About this Quote
A tidy little dagger of a line: it borrows Shakespeare’s grand machinery and then lets the air out with a shrug. “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” is the sort of sentence that flatters history into coherence. Frank Dane keeps the rhythm, keeps the promise of elevation, then swerves: “but not lately.” Suddenly the whole idea of “greatness” looks less like destiny and more like a fashion that’s gone out of season.
The intent feels twofold. First, it’s a critique of our era’s leadership pipeline: even the accidental heroes aren’t showing up. “Thrust upon them” implies reluctant responsibility, the kind that arrives via crisis, war, scandal, collapse. Dane’s add-on suggests we’re either starved for crises that produce clarity (unlikely) or, more plausibly, stuck in a culture that can’t recognize greatness when it appears because everything is mediated, contested, and instantly meme-ified.
The subtext is also a jab at nostalgia. People love to say we used to have giants, that history had gravitas and today has content. Dane doesn’t argue; he punctures. The comedy lands because it’s not just cynical, it’s economical: four extra words turn a quote about human possibility into an obituary for the present tense.
Context matters: as a writer, Dane is playing with inherited language to expose the hollowness of inherited myths. Greatness isn’t denied; it’s deferred. The bleak joke is that we’ve become so suspicious of the very concept that even fate has stopped trying.
The intent feels twofold. First, it’s a critique of our era’s leadership pipeline: even the accidental heroes aren’t showing up. “Thrust upon them” implies reluctant responsibility, the kind that arrives via crisis, war, scandal, collapse. Dane’s add-on suggests we’re either starved for crises that produce clarity (unlikely) or, more plausibly, stuck in a culture that can’t recognize greatness when it appears because everything is mediated, contested, and instantly meme-ified.
The subtext is also a jab at nostalgia. People love to say we used to have giants, that history had gravitas and today has content. Dane doesn’t argue; he punctures. The comedy lands because it’s not just cynical, it’s economical: four extra words turn a quote about human possibility into an obituary for the present tense.
Context matters: as a writer, Dane is playing with inherited language to expose the hollowness of inherited myths. Greatness isn’t denied; it’s deferred. The bleak joke is that we’ve become so suspicious of the very concept that even fate has stopped trying.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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