Daily Inspiration Quote by Dick Van Patten

"We're feeding all these zoos. And that's getting bigger and bigger" lands like an offhand complaint, but it’s really a snapshot of a certain late-20th-century celebrity common sense: civic life reduced to a household budget line item. Van Patten, best known as TV’s reliable dad, speaks in the plain, slightly exasperated cadence of someone scanning a bill and deciding the problem is obvious. That’s the trick. The sentence feels innocently practical, which is why its implications slide in so easily.

The specific intent is to frame public spending as a kind of perpetual, thankless caretaking: we (taxpayers, citizens, “normal people”) are stuck “feeding” institutions that keep multiplying. “Zoos” stands in for a whole category of public goods - cultural amenities, municipal projects, maybe even bureaucracy itself - that are easy to caricature as indulgent or inefficient. The verb choice matters. You don’t “fund” or “support” zoos; you “feed” them, as if they’re hungry animals that will only grow more demanding.

Subtextually, it’s also about scale anxiety. “Bigger and bigger” isn’t data; it’s a feeling. It turns growth into menace, suggests sprawl without governance, and invites the listener to share a gut-level suspicion that someone else’s priorities are breeding out of control. Coming from an actor associated with wholesome, middle-American TV, the line gains extra rhetorical cover: not an ideologue, just a dad noticing the world getting expensive and weird.