Time & Perspective Quote by Muriel Rukeyser

Rukeyser’s line reads like a refusal to let noble language do violence on ordinary life. “Choice” is her hard currency: present tense, available “at any moment,” contingent on being alive. That insistence matters in a century where politics, war, and ideology repeatedly tried to rebrand coercion as destiny. She’s not offering motivational uplift; she’s defending agency against the stories institutions tell when they want compliance.

The provocation is “there is no sacrifice.” Rukeyser isn’t denying loss. She’s denying the moral theater that turns loss into a badge and, worse, into a lever. “Sacrifice” implies a sacred transaction: you give up something and the universe (or the nation, or the cause) owes you meaning. Rukeyser cuts that bargain off. There is only a choice; “the rest falls away.” She’s stripping action down to its ethical core, where you can’t hide behind the romance of martyrdom or the accounting of what you “paid.”

“Second choice does not exist” is the sharpest blade here. It rebukes the fantasy of simultaneously doing the right thing and keeping all the comforts that contradict it. No split-screen morality, no “having it both ways.” It’s also a warning to the self: don’t invent imaginary alternatives that let you postpone commitment.

“Beware of those who talk about sacrifice” lands as cultural criticism. Leaders and movements love the word because it recruits people while laundering responsibility. Rukeyser, a poet of witness and consequence, is telling you to listen for that laundering - and to insist on the plain, frightening clarity of choosing.