Daily Inspiration Quote by Wilson Mizner

The line lands like a grin with a knife behind it: kindness isn’t framed as virtue, but as strategy in a world that keeps receipts. Mizner, a Broadway-era dramatist and professional wiseguy, understood reputations the way gamblers understand odds. “Be nice” sounds like Sunday-school advice until the second clause snaps it into place. The real engine is inevitability. You will go up; you will come down. The only variable is how many people are waiting when gravity does its work.

The intent is less moral instruction than social physics. The theater, like any status economy, runs on informal power: stagehands, producers, critics, rivals, patrons. The person you dismiss as irrelevant today can be the gatekeeper tomorrow. Mizner’s subtext is that hierarchy is temporary, memory is not. Courtesy becomes a kind of long-term insurance policy against your future self.

What makes it work is the compact narrative packed into “on your way up” and “on your way down.” It implies ambition (there is an “up”), ego (you might stop being nice), and humiliation (there will be a “down”). The symmetry is the joke; the menace is the lesson. It’s cynicism dressed as etiquette, warning that “networking” isn’t just collecting contacts when you’re winning, it’s not burning bridges when you’re feeling untouchable.

In Mizner’s era of hustlers and headline-makers, this reads like a survival rule for fickle industries. In ours, it doubles as a commentary on the internet’s permanent audience: the people you step over don’t disappear; they screenshot.