Daily Inspiration Quote by Norman Jewison

"Do what you're told, and everything will be all right" lands like reassurance, but it plays closer to a threat. Coming from Norman Jewison, a director who made mainstream films that kept picking fights with mainstream comfort (In the Heat of the Night, Fiddler on the Roof, Rollerball), the line reads less as personal advice than as a critique of how authority sells obedience: not with batons, but with lullabies.

The genius is in the grammar. The first clause is blunt, parental, almost militarized. The second is a promise of safety so vague it can never be audited. "All right" is the soft-focus ending studio executives love: tidy, apolitical, conflict resolved. Jewison knows that fantasy; his job was often to package hard social realities in forms audiences would actually buy a ticket for. The subtext is about the bargain a society offers: surrender your agency and you'll be spared uncertainty. It is also about the way institutions - governments, corporations, even families - outsource moral responsibility. If you were just following instructions, then nobody has to answer for the outcome.

Context matters: Jewison comes out of a 20th-century North American culture that prized order, conformity, and "good citizenship", especially under Cold War pressure. The line echoes the managerial voice of that era, the soothing cadence of compliance. Its sting is that it describes a faith many people still live by, even after history has repeatedly demonstrated how wrong "everything" can go.