Daily Inspiration Quote by George A. Moore

Plagiarism, in George Moore's telling, isn't the crime of borrowing; it's the sin of downgrading. The line is a neat insult disguised as a definition, turning a moral accusation into an aesthetic one. He implies that literature is a long chain of appropriation anyway, and the real scandal is incompetence: if you steal and still can't improve on what you took, you deserve the public shaming. It's a writer's version of "at least make it worth it."

Moore was a novelist and critic moving through late-Victorian and early modern literary culture, a world obsessed with originality while quietly running on influence, quotation, and imitation. His jab lands because it punctures that polite hypocrisy. By framing plagiarism as "making it worse", he takes a swipe at hack writers, yes, but also at the era's anxious fetish for novelty. The subtext is almost liberating: good artists take; great artists transform. If you can metabolize another man's work into something sharper, stranger, more alive, you're not a thief - you're part of the tradition.

There's also a social edge in the phrase "one man". It nods to the competitive, male-coded literary marketplace Moore inhabited, where reputation functioned like currency and "influence" could be both compliment and accusation. The wit works because it flips the courtroom logic: the evidence isn't similarity, it's mediocrity. Moore turns plagiarism from a legal category into a verdict on taste, and in doing so, exposes what writers often fear most - not being unoriginal, but being forgettable.