Daily Inspiration Quote by Mignon McLaughlin

McLaughlin opens with a lullaby and ends with a diagnosis. The line’s first move is disarming: “born brave, trusting and greedy” reads like a generous inventory of the human starter kit, three traits offered with the same grammatical warmth. Then she snaps the frame shut: “and most of us remain greedy.” It’s the pivot that gives the sentence its sting, turning what looked like balanced realism into a moral imbalance we’re meant to feel in our gut.

The intent isn’t to sneer at human nature so much as to puncture the sentimental story we tell about growing up: that experience sands down our rough edges into wisdom. McLaughlin suggests the opposite kind of education. Life doesn’t reliably teach courage or deepen trust; it teaches caution and suspicion. Greed, though, survives. Not because we’re uniquely wicked, but because greed is socially rewarded and endlessly rationalizable. You can dress it up as “ambition,” “security,” “providing,” “building a legacy.” Brave and trusting are expensive traits; greedy is scalable.

There’s also a journalist’s economy here: the sentence functions like a miniature trend report on modern life. Written in an era that watched prosperity, advertising, and Cold War anxiety braid together, it hints at a culture training people to clutch. The subtext is less “people are bad” than “systems make certain instincts easier to keep.” By pairing innocence (born) with appetite (greedy), McLaughlin refuses the comforting split between pure childhood and corrupted adulthood. The bleak joke is that we don’t lose our original sins; we lose our original virtues.