Daily Inspiration Quote by Wilson Mizner

Mizner was a Broadway-wise hustler with a saint’s vocabulary and a gambler’s grin, and this line plays that double game. He starts by granting anger a moral visa: it’s not only permissible, it’s “inevitable.” That word matters. It shifts anger from personal failing to human condition, a move that disarms the reader’s defensiveness. You can almost hear the room relax: fine, we’re not monsters for feeling it.

Then he tightens the screws with legalistic precision. Sin doesn’t live in the spark; it moves into the timing, the dosage, the story we tell ourselves. “Slight and inadequate provocation” skewers the ego’s favorite trick: upgrading a petty bruise into a righteous cause. Mizner is mocking the way people outsource their temper to “principle,” especially when the offense is small enough to be safely exaggerated. The phrase “conceived upon” makes anger sound like a self-generated pregnancy, an emotion we incubate rather than suffer.

The real sting is in duration: “when it continues long.” Here the quote turns from permission slip to indictment of grievance as lifestyle. Anger becomes sinful not because it flares, but because we curate it, replay it, preserve it past its usefulness. In Mizner’s era - Protestant moral language still set the public thermostat - invoking “the rule of Scripture” reads less like piety than like a stage prop: a borrowed authority used to expose hypocrisy. The subtext is bluntly modern: you don’t get to call it justice if it’s really just your pride refusing to let go.