A form of wickedness mixes longing for improved status with a sense of entitlement, then shakes vigorously. The recipe makes a deadly cocktail.
The craving of the lazy person is fatal,
for lazy hands refuse to labor.
It is one thing, we are instructed to understand, not to aspire to a better lot. The nicer homes and fuller accounts just a block away might well hold no appeal. One is born to this lot, not some other, and waddles unreflectively in it.
It is another to earnestly wish for a better plight, then to bend blood, sweat, tears, and blistered shoulders to the achieving of it. This way lie virtue and vice in, perhaps sixty-forty proportions.
Yet the proverb addresses itself neither to lack of imagination nor diligent endeavor. Rather, it reserves its acidic observation for the human being who wants more but won’t lift a finger to achieve it. The world, reading suggests and experience confirms, is too full of such lazy ambition.
Those who practice it are a cancer upon society, a blight on the commonwealth, and a curse upon their daughters and sons.
Hands here are seen as paralyzed, not because they lack the sinews, nerves, or digits that move others in increments from poverty to something more solid, but because they simply will not work. Labor is below them, yet they will not be lifted up either in exertion or in gratitude. They just hang there.
One might assume that hands like this do no particular harm, they simply accomplish no measurable advance. They are a wash, a zero, null.
The proverb knows better. Such inactive hands, hanging limply at the ends of a lazy man’s arms, are murderers. That their lethal legacy is silent makes it no less killing. The nourisher of lazy ambition dies by his inert hands. What the proverb stops short of saying is, by implication, clear: others fall too.
Such hands are arms. Smoking guns. Silent killers.
A good society despises them, and says so.
Canter Bridge 
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