Humor & Life Quote by Ring Lardner

Lardner’s line lands like a shrug with a switchblade inside it: a clean, comforting sentiment that quietly insults the whole cult of pedigree. Coming from a comedian who made a career out of puncturing American self-importance, it reads less like greeting-card uplift and more like a sideways jab at the era’s obsession with “good families” as moral proof. If your birth is treated as destiny, Lardner’s punchline is to demote it to trivia.

The intent is practical but sly. He’s offering permission to step out from under inherited scripts - class expectations, parental damage, the small-town reputations that cling like tobacco smoke. Yet he frames the escape in the most socially acceptable way possible: not by declaring independence, but by pointing to another institution Americans already sanctify. You don’t reject family; you upgrade it. That’s why it works. It smuggles rebellion inside an approved value.

The subtext has two edges. One is aspirational: you can choose better, build differently, become the ancestor you wished you had. The other is darker, and more Lardner: the “family you’re going to have” can be a promise or a threat, depending on whether you repeat the pattern. The quote flatters agency while hinting at the pressure to perform adulthood correctly, to produce a respectable future that redeems an imperfect past.

Context matters: early 20th-century America was busy industrializing, migrating, and reinventing itself. Lardner takes that churn and distills it into a single bit of advice that doubles as social satire: stop worshiping origins; start taking responsibility for outcomes.