Daily Inspiration Quote by Cleveland Amory

New England guilt, in Amory's telling, is less a moral brake than a mood disorder with good manners. The line lands because it refuses the usual myth of conscience as a policeman. Instead, conscience becomes an interior narrator: it lets you proceed, then robs you of the payoff. That twist is the joke, and the bite. Amory is puncturing a regional self-image built on restraint, rectitude, and “Yankee” discipline. The punchline implies that the real product of this culture isn’t virtue but chronic self-surveillance.

The subtext is sharper than the quip’s light tone suggests. A conscience that can’t prevent wrongdoing but can prevent pleasure is a machine for social conformity. It doesn’t eradicate desire; it trains you to distrust it. That’s a particularly New England species of control: not the flamboyant moralism of public scolding, but the private tightening of the jaw, the quiet inventory of sins, the sense that even fun should be earned, justified, and kept within tasteful limits.

Amory, a patrician satirist of American manners as much as a historian, is also diagnosing hypocrisy without shouting “hypocrisy.” By conceding that people will do what they want, he bypasses moral grandstanding and goes for the real drama: how communities manage reputation and self-respect. The line endures because it recognizes a modern truth about “good” cultures: they don’t always change behavior; they change the aftertaste.