Parenting & Family Quote by Edgar Rice Burroghs

Desire is doing double duty here: it is both the engine of moral life and the solvent that dissolves moral certainty. Burroughs frames virtue not as a pristine state opposed to appetite, but as something that only exists because people want things. Without wanting, there is no temptation, no sacrifice, no self-control - in other words, no stage on which “virtue” can even perform. It’s a deliberately mischievous reversal of the sermon model where desire is the dirty fuel and virtue the clean fire.

Then he sharpens the blade with relativism: because desires differ from person to person, moral labels start looking suspiciously like social paperwork. “Who shall say” is the key rhetorical move; it’s less a question than a challenge to the self-appointed judge. The “child of his desire” metaphor carries the subtext that actions are born from longing, and like children, they arrive with mixed inheritances: part instinct, part environment, part story we tell after the fact.

Context matters. Burroughs wrote popular adventure fiction in an era that loved clear heroes and villains, yet his worlds (Tarzan’s “civilization” vs. the jungle, Mars’s shifting codes of honor) repeatedly poke at the arbitrariness of “civilized” morality. This line reads like a writer’s manifesto smuggled into a moral aphorism: what looks like vice from one tribe is virtue in another, and the real drama is in the clash of appetites, not in tidy moral bookkeeping. It’s a defense of narrative conflict, and a warning about moral certainty dressed up as common sense.