Daily Inspiration Quote by George A. Romero

Romero’s idea of freedom comes wrapped in a filmmaker’s practical cynicism: most people aren’t unfree because they lack imagination, they’re unfree because they’re on the payroll. “Very low or huge money” names two zones where the market’s leash slackens. At the bottom, there’s nothing left to lose; you can make the scrappy movie, take the weird gig, fail publicly, and still be where you started. At the top, wealth functions like insulation: you can refuse notes, walk away from projects, fund your own risks. The trap is the middle, where stability becomes a form of management and “freedom” is rebranded as professional reliability.

The subtext feels especially Romero: the director who built a revolution in horror on shoestring budgets, then spent decades watching the industry metabolize his innovations while tightening its grip on what gets made and why. His zombies were never just monsters; they were consumer behavior with a pulse. Here, the undead horde is the respectable career ladder, shuffling forward on mortgages, health insurance, and the quiet terror of being replaceable.

What makes the line work is its blunt, almost offhand geometry. He doesn’t moralize about selling out; he points to incentives. “Only free” is provocation, not absolute truth, but it’s a clean way to describe how patronage works in modern culture: if you can’t starve and you can’t self-finance, someone else gets a vote.