Daily Inspiration Quote by Clare Boothe Luce

Hopelessness, in Clare Boothe Luce's framing, isn’t a property of the world; it’s a posture people adopt when they’re tired of paying attention. The line pulls a neat trick: it sounds like stoic uplift, but it’s also an accusation. By stripping “hopeless situations” of their legitimacy, Luce relocates failure from fate to character, from circumstance to nerve. The verb choice matters. Men don’t become hopeless; they “grow” hopeless, as if despair is a cultivated habit, a slow surrender practiced over time.

Coming from a dramatist, the sentence reads like stage direction for the human spirit. Drama hinges on reversals, on the moment a character decides the story isn’t finished. Luce’s aphorism insists that the plot only stalls when the protagonist gives up imaginative agency. That’s why it works rhetorically: it offers moral leverage. If hopelessness is learned, it can be unlearned. The audience hears a promise disguised as a rebuke.

The subtext is sharper, and more political, than it first appears. “Situations” are impersonal systems - wars, careers, marriages, reputations - the kind of external machinery people love to blame. Luce denies that machinery its alibi. The line also carries the period’s confidence in willpower and self-making, the mid-century belief that stamina is a civic virtue, not just a private one.

And then there’s the loaded “men.” It’s both generic and pointed: the masculine-coded ethic of grit, the expectation that adults, especially public actors, don’t get to call time-outs. Luce isn’t offering comfort. She’s demanding a second act.