Success Quote by Lillian Hellman

Hellman’s line is a small knife: it cuts against the cozy fiction that manners are simply “good breeding” or personal virtue. “You lose your manners when you are poor” isn’t really about etiquette; it’s about attrition. Poverty doesn’t just empty your wallet, it crowds your inner life until politeness becomes an unaffordable luxury - time, patience, privacy, and the benefit of the doubt all cost something.

The sentence works because it’s framed as inevitability, not accusation. “Lose” suggests something once possessed, then taken away by circumstances, like sleep or dignity. Hellman also picks “manners,” a word that sounds soft and social, to smuggle in a harsher claim: class isn’t only money, it’s behavior policed by people who can afford calm. The poor aren’t merely judged for lacking resources; they’re judged for the visible stress responses those lack create. Snappishness, bluntness, impatience, guardedness - these become read as moral failure rather than survival.

As a dramatist, Hellman understood how power shows up in dialogue: who gets to be gracious, who must be direct, who can risk being misunderstood. In her world of sharp social hierarchies and moral compromise, manners are not neutral. They’re a performance that signals belonging, and they’re easiest to sustain when you aren’t constantly negotiating humiliation, bureaucratic friction, or the daily violence of being disbelieved. The subtext is almost prosecutorial: if you want to talk about “civility,” first ask who has been forced to trade it away to get through the day.