Love Quote by Heywood Broun

A lesser moralist might claim humans rise above animals through reason or compassion. Broun goes for the jugular: our defining talent is turning sex into play. The punch is in the word "frivolously" - not merely having desire, but styling it, detaching it from survival, and using it as a social instrument. Where beasts mate under the blunt governance of biology, humans can make eros into theater: flirtation, affairs, jokes, rituals, scandal, art. Broun is less celebrating promiscuity than skewering the human need to narrate appetite as something refined, even when its engine is primitive.

The subtext is cynically democratic. He refuses the usual flattering mythology of human exceptionalism and replaces it with a trait that is at once sophisticated and slightly embarrassing. "Make love" is already euphemistic; tacking on "frivolously" exposes the euphemism as part of the act. We don't just pursue pleasure; we dress it up in language, etiquette, and self-justification, then congratulate ourselves for the costume.

Context matters: Broun wrote in an America ricocheting between Jazz Age looseness and Prohibition-era moral panic. As a journalist with a taste for puncturing pieties, he uses a seemingly naughty premise to critique social hypocrisy: we preach restraint, yet our real distinction is our capacity to separate sex from necessity and still call it civilized. It's a one-line indictment of both prudishness and the smug idea that culture always elevates us.