Life's Pleasures Quote by Charles Farrar Browne

A perfectly crooked sentence: it starts by sounding like moral outrage, then swerves into a punchline that exposes how “impunity” often works in public life. Charles Farrar Browne, better known as Artemus Ward, was a master of deadpan misdirection, and this line uses a tiny grammatical glitch to sketch an entire social ecosystem. “They drink with impunity” suggests rule-breaking without consequence. Then the qualifier lands: “or anybody who invites them.” Suddenly the “impunity” isn’t lawlessness at all; it’s entitlement subsidized by other people’s hospitality.

The intent is satirical, but not just about alcohol. Ward is ribbing a type: the respectable mooch, the person whose freedom from consequences comes from social networks rather than virtue. The line quietly indicts the way communities normalize excess as long as it’s packaged as conviviality. If the drinks are on someone else, the behavior becomes not only acceptable but almost expected.

Context matters: Browne wrote in mid-19th-century America, when temperance campaigns were loud and moral language around drinking was everywhere. He borrows that sermon-tone vocabulary (“impunity”) and empties it out with one cheap little pivot, turning moral panic into a critique of hypocrisy and classed privilege. The joke also flatters the reader: you’re invited to notice how easily society confuses “being treated” with “being innocent.” That’s Ward’s trick - a single sentence that pretends to stumble, then reveals it was aiming for the jugular all along.