Love Quote by Edgar Watson Howe

Edgar Watson Howe lands the punch with a contrarian shrug: most of our messes aren’t caused by greed, politics, or stupidity, but by the very attachments we treat as moral upgrades. The line works because it flips the sentimental hierarchy. Love is supposed to be the dangerous one - jealous, possessive, irrational - while friendship gets marketed as the cleaner bond, the low-risk version of intimacy. Howe doesn’t buy the distinction. He suggests a single continuum of allegiance: once you care, you’re compromised.

The phrasing is slyly absolute. “The little trouble” minimizes catastrophe, as if human conflict is mostly petty and avoidable, then immediately blames what we prize most. “That is not due to love is due to friendship” is a neat logical trap, a tidy binary that leaves no room for neutral motives. It reads like newsroom wisdom from an editor who has watched civic life operate less on principle than on loyalties: who you’ll cover for, who gets the benefit of the doubt, whose reputation you’ll protect, whose enemies you’ll inherit.

Subtext: friendship is not simply support; it’s a voting bloc, an informal machine. It pulls people into favoritism, groupthink, and performative solidarity. Love makes us reckless in private; friendship makes us reckless in public, because it recruits witnesses and demands sides. Coming from a turn-of-the-century American editor, the cynicism tracks: small-town feuds, political patronage, clubby institutions. Howe’s point isn’t that affection is bad. It’s that the price of belonging is drama - and the bill always comes due.