Life & Wisdom Quote by E. B. White

White lands the punch with a magician’s misdirection: “profit system” sounds like a neutral description of how modern economies work, then he flips it into a moral and statistical indictment. The line is built on a petty-sounding semantic trap - if the system is organized around profit, why are most people not the ones profiting? That deadpan inversion is classic White: urbane, bemused, and quietly furious. He doesn’t argue from ideology; he argues from arithmetic and lived experience.

The specific intent is to puncture the sanctimony of capitalism’s brand messaging. “Profit” is treated as a synonym for efficiency, innovation, even virtue. White treats it as a distribution problem. The subtext is that the “system” is less a natural order than a story we tell to justify who gets paid, who gets squeezed, and why inequality is framed as collateral damage rather than a design feature. “Always been” widens the charge: this isn’t a temporary glitch or a bad decade, it’s structural.

Context matters: White wrote through the Depression, the New Deal, wartime mobilization, and the rise of consumer abundance. He watched Americans be sold prosperity as a civic religion while unions fought for basic security and corporations perfected the art of privatizing gains and socializing risks. The line works because it’s not a manifesto; it’s a single, elegant contradiction that forces the reader to notice the gap between the rhetoric of opportunity and the reality of who gets to keep the winnings.