Art & Creativity Quote by Finley Peter Dunne

Goodness is boring, and Dunne is pleased to weaponize that boredom. The line is a newspaperman's shrug turned into a cultural diagnosis: what gets ink is not virtue but rupture. By joking that the world's convents could fit on a postage stamp, he isn't really measuring nuns; he's measuring the press's appetite for spectacle. The exaggeration works because it flatters the reader's cynicism while indicting it. We laugh, then notice the laugh is the problem.

Dunne wrote as Mr. Dooley, his famous Irish bartender persona, a setup that let him smuggle hard commentary into barroom talk. That context matters: in an era of yellow journalism and competitive city papers, "news" was increasingly defined by what could seize attention fast. Dunne isn't naïve about human nature, but his real target is the machinery that turns misbehavior into currency. "There ain't any news in being good" is less observation than self-fulfilling prophecy: if editors only reward scandal, institutions learn that decency buys silence, while outrage buys a headline.

The convent image sharpens the subtext. Convents symbolize disciplined, repetitive good works - care, restraint, routine. They're also easy to stereotype as hidden, cloistered, unmarketable. Dunne is pointing out how moral labor is systematically made invisible because it lacks narrative fireworks. The joke lands because it's not just about what happens in convents; it's about how modern public life trains us to treat quiet competence as blank space.