Time & Perspective Quote by Quentin Crisp

A neat little blade of social observation: Crisp frames Britishness as a culture that treats happiness like a slightly vulgar hobby, while elevating correctness into a moral sport. The line works because it’s not really about emotion; it’s about social permission. Happiness implies appetite, display, and the risk of looking pleased with yourself. Being “right,” by contrast, is austere, defensible, and safely armored in rules. Crisp is satirizing a national temperament that would rather win an argument than enjoy the party.

The subtext is class-coded. “Right” doesn’t just mean factually accurate; it means proper, measured, in good taste. Crisp, a flamboyantly visible outsider in mid-century Britain, knew how quickly “improper” could become “unacceptable.” When your environment polices tone, dress, and desire, happiness becomes suspect because it’s hard to regulate. Correctness is legible. It can be inspected. It can be enforced.

There’s also a delicious inversion of the modern self-help mandate. Crisp implies that the British aren’t failing to achieve happiness; they’re refusing the premise that happiness is the point. That cynicism lands because it’s delivered as casual reportage (“I had the impression...”), a rhetorical shrug that makes the critique feel earned rather than sermonized.

Context matters: Crisp lived through a Britain where queerness was criminalized and conformity was currency. In that light, “wanting to be right” reads less like quaint national character and more like survival strategy dressed up as virtue.