Faith & Spirit Quote by B. C. Forbes

Anger, here, isn’t treated as a feeling to “process” so much as a lapse in discipline - and Forbes reaches for the oldest surveillance system in the West to keep it in check. “God is always looking upon him” turns restraint into a live, ongoing audition. The line works because it compresses moral philosophy into a single pressure point: you are never offstage, so your temper is never private.

Forbes was a journalist-entrepreneur who helped shape early 20th-century business culture, a world obsessed with self-control, reputation, and the kind of “character” that reads like a balance sheet. In that context, anger isn’t merely spiritually risky; it’s economically stupid. Lose your cool and you lose credibility, influence, maybe your livelihood. The sentence offers a portable technology of composure: instead of counting to ten, you picture a witness who cannot be bribed, distracted, or fooled.

The subtext is as bracing as it is pious: your interior life is accountable. That’s a comforting thought if you want justice; it’s an unsettling one if you want privacy. Forbes also neatly dodges the modern excuse that rage is “authentic.” His framework isn’t self-expression but stewardship: of the self, of one’s standing, of one’s responsibilities to others.

There’s a quiet social control embedded in the theology. Anger is framed not as a response to injustice that might need channeling, but as a personal failure corrected by being watched. The genius - and the limitation - is the same: it makes restraint effortless, and it makes dissent harder to justify.