Daily Inspiration Quote by Patricia Schroeder

Schroeder’s line is a rude little mnemonic for an era that liked its greed with a punchline. “Get what you can, can what you get, and sit on the can” compresses a whole political economy into a three-step program: take, hoard, and guard. The sing-song repetition (“can…can…can”) isn’t accidental. It mimics the breezy slogans of consumer culture, then turns them sour, suggesting that the decade’s moral language had been reduced to branding.

As a Democratic congresswoman who made her name challenging militarism, corporate power, and the conservative turn, Schroeder is not describing the 80s so much as indicting its governing ethos. “Get what you can” sketches the high-gloss promise of deregulation and upward mobility; “can what you get” points to asset-stripping, financialization, and the conversion of public goods into private stockpiles; “sit on the can” delivers the kicker: once accumulated, power becomes defensive, even immobilized. The image is comic, but the subtext is anxiety about stagnation - wealth and influence locked up, not circulating.

The quote works because it marries moral critique to bodily humor. “Sit on the can” yanks grand ideology down to the level of clenched posture and possessive instinct. It’s a leader’s rhetoric that refuses reverence for the market’s self-mythology, treating the decade’s confidence as something petty and faintly ridiculous. The joke lands, then lingers as an accusation: prosperity without solidarity curdles into a kind of civic constipation.