Daily Inspiration Quote by Roy L. Smith

Smith’s line lands like a sermon distilled to a single uncomfortable diagnosis: the world’s crisis isn’t scarcity, it’s refusal. By pairing “ability to produce” with “unwillingness to share,” he deliberately dismantles the comforting myth that poverty is mainly a technical problem waiting on more innovation, more efficiency, more growth. Production is framed as competence; sharing is framed as character. The pivot is moral, not managerial.

The specific intent is corrective and pastoral. As a clergyman, Smith is speaking into the long tradition of Christian social teaching that treats hoarding as a spiritual disorder, not just an economic strategy. “Difficulty with the world” is a sweeping phrase that sounds almost naïve until you catch its implied accusation: we already have enough, and our systems - and our hearts - are arranged to make “enough” inaccessible to the people who most need it.

The subtext sharpens further in its use of “unwillingness,” a word that makes inequality feel less like a natural disaster and more like a choice repeated daily: at the ballot box, in wage structures, in charitable habits, in what we rationalize as “deserved.” It quietly indicts the ways modern societies celebrate producers while treating redistribution as suspect, sentimental, or dangerous.

Contextually, the quote fits a 20th-century American religious voice responding to industrial abundance alongside persistent deprivation. It doesn’t romanticize poverty or demonize wealth; it suggests something more unsettling: our greatest obstacle is ethical consent. The world can build. The question is whether it can bear to belong to itself.