Daily Inspiration Quote by Edgar Watson Howe

A barb like this only lands because it flatters and insults at the same time. Edgar Watson Howe, a newspaper editor with a front-row seat to human appetite, frames the public as essentially untrainable: people reliably like what harms them, and the lone wholesome pleasure is the one that switches consciousness off. It is wit built from a bleak inventory of American cravings, delivered with the editor’s instinct for what will sting without sounding moralistic.

The line’s trick is its faux generosity. Howe doesn’t say people never choose the good; he grants them one exception, then makes that exception oddly passive. Sleep isn’t virtue. It’s surrender. That’s the subtext: if our best-liked “good” is unconsciousness, the waking world is where we mismanage ourselves - chasing stimulants, gossip, status, liquor, spectacle, whatever keeps the nerves lit. Coming from an editor, it also reads like a sly newsroom confession. The job runs on deadlines and agitation; the paper profits from the very restlessness it critiques. Sleep becomes the imagined antidote to an economy of attention.

The context matters: Howe wrote in an era when mass-circulation journalism, advertising, and urban leisure were professionalizing desire. His sentence punctures the Progressive Era’s self-improvement rhetoric without rejecting it outright; it just doubts the mechanism. People don’t need better advice, he implies. They need fewer temptations, or at least a silence deep enough to make temptation impossible. The joke is cynical, but it’s also a precise diagnosis of a culture that mistakes stimulation for living.