Daily Inspiration Quote by Norman Jewison

Jewison is yanking the moral rug out from under the audience’s favorite comfort: that evil announces itself with a villain’s mustache. His provocation is less about Nazis as historical monsters than about the everyday psychology that makes monsters possible. By insisting they “didn’t see themselves as bad people,” he targets the self-justifying stories people tell to stay clean in their own mirror: duty, tradition, “common sense,” protecting family, preserving order. The line doesn’t exonerate; it indicts the mechanism.

The second beat sharpens the blade: “I’ve never met a racist yet who thought he was a racist.” That’s observational, almost deadpan, and it lands because it matches how bias actually travels in modern life - through euphemism, denial, and selective definitions. People reserve “racist” for someone worse than themselves. They outsource the label to caricatures while keeping their own behavior filed under “realism,” “jokes,” “preferences,” or “statistics.” Jewison’s point is that prejudice rarely feels like hatred from the inside; it feels like normal.

As a director, he’s also making an argument about storytelling. Movies have trained us to spot the bad guy through cues: uniforms, snarls, slurs. Jewison pushes against that cinematic grammar, warning that the most dangerous characters are the ones who believe they’re decent. The subtext is a cultural challenge: if no one thinks they’re the problem, then the problem doesn’t get confronted - it gets inherited, politely, generation after generation.