Life & Wisdom Quote by Don Herold

Herold’s line is a one-sentence demolition of moral heroics. It takes the familiar sermon - resist temptation, be strong, be good - and answers with a shrug so perfectly timed it becomes an argument. The joke isn’t that temptation is inevitable; it’s that the whole self-improvement industry pretends it’s a finite problem you can “beat” if you just grit your teeth hard enough. Herold flips the premise: if temptation is renewable, then resistance starts to look less like virtue and more like bad budgeting of willpower.

The subtext is quietly modern: the world is designed to keep offering you the next thing. If you’re living in a culture of constant novelty - new desires, new products, new distractions - then framing morality as a single triumphant refusal is almost naive. Herold doesn’t need to name consumerism or advertising for the logic to land; the line anticipates them. It’s a pre-digital observation that reads like it was written for the push notification era.

Context matters: Herold was a humorist in an America that prized respectability while also industrializing pleasure. Prohibition and its aftermath, the rise of mass media, the swelling market for “clean living” advice - all of it makes this quip feel like a wry aside from the back row of a lecture on righteousness. It works because it turns temptation into a supply chain: endless inventory, always restocked. The laugh carries a sting: maybe the problem isn’t our weakness; maybe it’s the idea that restraint can ever be final.