Creativity Quote by Tom Lehrer

Lehrer takes the Boy Scout motto and slips a banana peel under it. "Be prepared" starts as earnest civic advice; then he snaps the hinge: "be careful not to do your good deeds when there's no one watching you". The line lands because it treats virtue like a stage trick. Not only is goodness performative, it is risky when it lacks an audience - wasteful, even suspicious, because it produces no reputational return.

The specific intent is satirical moral accounting. Lehrer, a songwriter who made a career out of smiling while sharpening knives, points at a mid-century American culture obsessed with respectability: churchy public virtue, suburban propriety, patriotic conformity. In that world, ethics can become a kind of public relations, and the joke is that the PR has eaten the ethics. The "be careful" is key: it mimics the anxious tone of etiquette manuals and civic organizations, as if the real danger isn’t doing wrong but doing right invisibly.

Subtext: altruism is often a transaction, and the currency is recognition. Lehrer doesn’t argue that no one is genuinely good; he suggests that institutions and incentives train us to confuse being seen as good with being good. The line also needles the listener: if it stings, it’s because you can picture the moment you chose the charitable act that photographed well.

Context matters: Lehrer’s songs (notably "National Brotherhood Week") skewer polite hypocrisy with catchy tunes. This quip fits his larger project - exposing how easily moral language becomes social camouflage, then daring you to laugh without letting yourself off the hook.