Time & Perspective Quote by John Harrison

Panic arrives not as a scream but as a practical decision: when the roof starts to peel away, it is, finally, time to leave. John Harrison’s line reads like the reluctant creed of an inventor caught between stubborn focus and physical reality. The first clause - “I didn't feel that running away would change anything” - is a confession of temperament. Harrison was famously tenacious, the kind of craftsman who could spend years shaving friction out of a mechanism most people couldn’t even picture. “Running away” isn’t just cowardice here; it’s the default human impulse to abandon a failing situation. He rejects it on principle, almost on engineering grounds: if departure doesn’t alter the system, why do it?

Then the garage roof starts coming off, and the sentence flips. The comedy is in the escalation: he doesn’t leave at the first sign of trouble, or even the second. He leaves when the structure itself begins to disassemble. That’s not bravado so much as a calibration of risk, the mindset of someone trained to separate signal from noise. He’s telling you he’s not moved by vibes; he’s moved by evidence.

The subtext lands neatly in the Enlightenment era’s faith in reason, but it also exposes its blind spot: rationality can become an excuse to endure what’s already untenable. Harrison’s genius depended on obsession. This quote sketches the human cost of that posture - the way inventors, entrepreneurs, and workaholics alike talk themselves into staying put until the disaster becomes literal. Only when the world physically breaks does he permit himself the “irrational” act of saving his own skin.