Nature & Animals Quote by Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday’s joke lands with the sly confidence of someone who’s watched “progress” get sold as salvation and still smelled the hustle underneath. On the surface, it’s a one-liner about alternative fuel: horse manure might not improve efficiency, but at least nobody’s going to steal it. Underneath, it’s a pointed little parable about American ingenuity and American desperation sharing the same cigarette.

The setup flatters the fantasy of technological fixes - “they think they can” - then immediately punctures it with a practical question any working person would ask: does it actually get you where you need to go? That pivot matters. Holiday doesn’t argue policy; she needles the gap between big claims and lived reality. Then she swerves into the punchline about siphoning, reframing the whole thing as an economics story: scarcity creates theft, and theft is just another form of participation in a system where people are squeezed. If fuel comes from manure, the value shifts, the crime shifts, the whole petty-cat-and-mouse dissolves. It’s gallows humor for a society forever improvising around lack.

Context sharpens it. Holiday lived through Prohibition’s aftermath, the Great Depression, wartime rationing, and a policing apparatus that treated her body and autonomy as public property. She knew what it meant for commodities to become moralized and controlled, and for everyday survival to be criminalized. The manure gag isn’t rustic whimsy; it’s a wink at how quickly “innovation” becomes another stage for inequality. If the future runs on waste, at least the thieves will finally be out of work.