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Art & Creativity Quote by Henry R. Luce

"There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write"

About this Quote

Luce draws a clean, almost cruel line between two kinds of literacy: the imaginative and the managerial. The first clause flatters “men who can write poetry” with the aura of rare talent; the second demotes balance sheets to a kind of necessary drudgery. Then he lands the dagger: the accountants of modern life “cannot write.” It’s not an argument so much as a provocation, the kind an editor makes when he wants to remind a culture that numbers are winning.

The subtext is anxiety disguised as swagger. Mid-century American power was increasingly organized by corporations, budgets, and technocrats - the spreadsheet as worldview. Luce, the great architect of Time and Life, helped build the mass-media machine that sold that worldview, yet he also depended on writers to give it voice. The quote reads like a warning shot to his own era: a society that prizes measurement will end up staffed by people who can’t tell stories about what they’re measuring. That’s not just a jab at financiers; it’s a fear about who gets to define reality.

It also smuggles in a gendered hierarchy (“men” repeated like a drumbeat) that matches the period’s newsroom-and-boardroom gatekeeping: poetry as masculine genius, bookkeeping as masculine control. The line works because it’s blunt enough to be quotable and unfair enough to sting. Luce isn’t describing an absolute truth; he’s defending the cultural authority of writers in an economy that increasingly treats writing as decoration on a quarterly report.

Quote Details

TopicWitty One-Liners
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Luce, Henry R. (2026, January 16). There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-men-who-can-write-poetry-and-there-are-132942/

Chicago Style
Luce, Henry R. "There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-men-who-can-write-poetry-and-there-are-132942/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"There are men who can write poetry, and there are men who can read balance sheets. The men who can read balance sheets cannot write." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/there-are-men-who-can-write-poetry-and-there-are-132942/. Accessed 4 Feb. 2026.

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Men Who Write Poetry vs Men Who Read Balance Sheets - Henry R Luce
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About the Author

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Henry R. Luce (April 3, 1898 - February 28, 1967) was a Editor from USA.

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