Life's Pleasures Quote by W. C. Fields

W. C. Fields builds a whole worldview out of a barroom binary: in modern life, you can profit off the poison or anesthetize yourself with it. The line lands because it’s both punchline and diagnosis. Fields isn’t really giving career advice; he’s staging a rigged game where “getting ahead” has been reduced to hustling vice or surrendering to it. The joke is how neatly it collapses the American promise of upward mobility into two options that are equally bleak.

The specific intent is classic Fields: weaponized pessimism delivered with a wink. By framing liquor as the only ladder, he mocks a culture that equates success with extraction and survival with escape. “Sell” and “drink” are mirror verbs, two sides of the same transaction: somebody always pays, whether in cash or in consciousness. The laugh comes from recognition, not surprise.

Context matters. Fields’ prime years ran through Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the rise of mass entertainment. Liquor was simultaneously illegal, ubiquitous, moralized, and monetized; the era made hypocrisy a national sport. His persona the perpetually put-upon grifter, suspicious of institutions turns alcohol into shorthand for a broader system: politicians sermonize, businessmen cash in, ordinary people cope. The cynicism is theatrical, but the subtext is sharp: when society sells you scarcity and stress, it also sells you the “solutions,” and calls the whole cycle progress.