Time & Perspective Quote by Lawrence Tierney

"Hey, any time you're throwing bodies over board it is to save yourself" lands like a barroom truth dressed up as a maritime proverb: blunt, unsentimental, and suspicious of anyone claiming necessity as virtue. Coming from Lawrence Tierney, an actor whose screen presence radiated menace and hard-won realism, the line feels less like metaphor than confession. The casual "Hey" is doing work. It shrinks the moral distance, as if the speaker is letting you in on a rule everybody knows but pretends not to.

The intent is clarifying, almost corrective: stop romanticizing brutality as strategy or duty. "Throwing bodies over board" evokes mob clean-ups, war triage, corporate downsizing, Hollywood blacklists - any system where people become disposable weight. The phrase implies deliberation and physical effort; this isn't an accident, it's a choice. And "to save yourself" punctures every collective excuse. Not "to save the ship", not "for the mission" - the selfish core is named.

Subtext: survival narratives are often self-justification. When institutions tell stories about sacrifice, there's usually an individual (or a small class of individuals) staying afloat. The line also carries a grim psychology: in a crisis, the first casualty is empathy, and the second is honesty about why it died.

Contextually, Tierney's era was steeped in noir ethics and postwar cynicism, where men did ugly things and called it pragmatism. The quote works because it refuses the comforting middle ground. It doesn't ask you to judge; it dares you to recognize the pattern.