Daily Inspiration Quote by Paddy Chayefsky

Chayefsky’s line doesn’t sneer at morality so much as at the social havoc caused by people who confuse being “right” with being harmless. The prayerful opening, “God save us,” is doing double duty: it borrows the language of virtue to indict virtue’s most sanctimonious version, the kind that demands witnesses, casualties, and a clean conscience more than it demands care. That pivot into “people who do the morally right thing” is the trapdoor. The phrase sounds noble, almost civics-textbook bland, which is exactly why it lands; it’s the sort of self-description every crusader uses right before they light the match.

The subtext is classic Chayefsky: systems aren’t usually toppled by villains twirling mustaches but by earnest actors convinced history has deputized them. Moral certainty becomes a battering ram. “It’s always the rest of us” frames collateral damage as a predictable feature, not an accident. The passive construction is key: the righteous rarely “break” people, they “do what must be done,” and somehow others end up “broken in half.”

Context matters because Chayefsky wrote in an America marinating in institutional distrust and televised righteousness: the era when public virtue became performance and private doubt looked like weakness. His work repeatedly targets sanctimony dressed up as public service. Here, he’s warning that moral absolutism creates a brutal math: one person’s purity often requires another person’s ruin. The line stings because it admits a dark civic truth: the most frightening zealots are the ones who can sleep at night.