Life & Wisdom Quote by Robert W. Service

Service is selling grit as a moral solvent. “Rough and tough” isn’t just a taste in company; it’s a vote against polish, etiquette, and the kind of social order that lets people hide behind roles. The line tightens with repetition - “tough… tougher” - like a man doubling down at the bar, insisting that difficulty isn’t a nuisance but the whole point. Then he drops the payoff: “bedrock.” Hard conditions strip away the decorative layers of class, manners, and aspiration until you hit something stubbornly real.

The subtext is populist and suspicious of comfort. Service is writing out of the Yukon/Frontier mythos he helped popularize: boomtowns, camps, and cold where survival is immediate and reputations are earned fast. In that world, “society” isn’t salons and civility; it’s whoever can be counted on when things go bad. Calling them “human people” is deliberately plain, almost clumsy, as if refined language itself is part of the problem. He’s implying that gentler environments encourage performance - status, hypocrisy, strategic niceness - while hardship forces candor, competence, and a kind of blunt solidarity.

There’s also a quiet provocation here: if you need brutality to access “real” humanity, what does that say about the humanity on display in comfortable life? Service courts the romantic idea that authenticity lives where it hurts. The quote works because it flatters the listener’s desire to believe that beneath social theater, there’s a truer self - and that you can meet it by choosing the cold edge over the warm room.