"Forgive your enemies, but first get even"
About this Quote
“Forgive your enemies, but first get even” is a line built like a punchline and loaded like a weapon. Lester Cole, a Hollywood screenwriter who lived through the studio system’s moral posturing and the political blood sport of the blacklist, understands the American appetite for virtue with a side of vengeance. The sentence starts in the register of Sunday-school wisdom, then swerves into gangster logic. That turn isn’t just humor; it’s an expose of how easily moral language becomes a costume for appetite.
The intent is to indict hypocrisy without sounding like a sermon. “Forgive” arrives as a social requirement, a performance of civility that lets a community keep functioning. “But first” tells on the speaker: forgiveness is framed as a luxury you earn after settling the score. The phrase “get even” is blunt, transactional, almost childish in its arithmetic. It reduces justice to symmetry, not repair. That simplification is the point. Cole is sketching a culture where righteousness is often retrofitted to whatever we already wanted to do.
Context matters: Cole’s era prized clean narratives and clean hands, even as careers were ruined by insinuation and loyalty tests. In that world, “forgiveness” can look like complicity, while revenge masquerades as principle. The line lands because it captures a common emotional sequence people rarely admit: hurt, retaliation, then a carefully staged magnanimity. It’s cynicism, yes, but also craft. Like a good screenplay, it reveals character in a single beat: the kind of person who wants to be seen as moral, but refuses to lose.
The intent is to indict hypocrisy without sounding like a sermon. “Forgive” arrives as a social requirement, a performance of civility that lets a community keep functioning. “But first” tells on the speaker: forgiveness is framed as a luxury you earn after settling the score. The phrase “get even” is blunt, transactional, almost childish in its arithmetic. It reduces justice to symmetry, not repair. That simplification is the point. Cole is sketching a culture where righteousness is often retrofitted to whatever we already wanted to do.
Context matters: Cole’s era prized clean narratives and clean hands, even as careers were ruined by insinuation and loyalty tests. In that world, “forgiveness” can look like complicity, while revenge masquerades as principle. The line lands because it captures a common emotional sequence people rarely admit: hurt, retaliation, then a carefully staged magnanimity. It’s cynicism, yes, but also craft. Like a good screenplay, it reveals character in a single beat: the kind of person who wants to be seen as moral, but refuses to lose.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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