Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Jay Lerner

A line like "With a little bit of luck, you'll never work!" lands because it flatters a fantasy while quietly mocking it. Lerner, a Broadway dramatist steeped in the mechanics of show-business aspiration, understands that Americans don’t just want success; they want the cleanest possible origin story for it. “A little bit of luck” is doing heavy lifting here, shrinking the messy reality of craft, class, and connections into a breezy charm. The punch is the final word: “work.” Not “struggle” or “worry” but work, the supposedly noble virtue that also happens to be exhausting, repetitive, and often unrewarding.

The intent is comic, but the subtext is pointed: our culture treats labor as both moral proof and life sentence. Lerner twists the knife by suggesting that the ultimate win is not meaningful work, but escape from work entirely. That’s a show tune’s wink at the audience: we applaud hustle in public, then privately daydream about the jackpot, the patron, the break, the rich spouse, the hit that frees us from the daily grind.

Context matters. Lerner wrote in an era when Broadway sold glamour as an industry, and his own career depended on invisible labor - rewrites, rehearsals, collaboration - that audiences never see. The line doubles as insider irony: in entertainment, “luck” is often a polite euphemism for timing, networks, and a system that rewards a few spectacularly. It’s funny because it’s true, and a little ugly because we recognize the wish.