Daily Inspiration Quote by George Weinberg

Weinberg’s sentence lands with the quiet chill of someone who has spent a career watching how power disguises itself as “attitude.” On the surface it’s practical advice: don’t engage hostility unless you have to. Underneath, it’s an x-ray of dependency. The hostility isn’t just unpleasant; it’s positioned as a tollbooth. When the hostile person controls access to credentials (professors at Columbia) or shelter (a landlord), avoidance stops being a healthy boundary and starts looking like a luxury good.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “I try not to deal” signals discipline, even self-protection, but the clause that follows - “though I must” - admits the limits of psychology when you’re trapped in a hierarchy. Weinberg, who coined the term “homophobia,” is writing in the long shadow of mid-century institutions that could punish difference while insisting they were merely being “professional.” By naming professors and a landlord, he points to gatekeepers who can keep their hostility plausibly deniable. They don’t have to scream slurs; they just have to make cooperation costly.

There’s also a subtle critique of therapeutic culture’s favorite fantasy: that interpersonal conflict is best solved by insight and communication. Weinberg suggests a blunter truth: sometimes you manage hostility the way you manage bad weather, by navigating around it until the person holding the keys stops holding them. It’s less a confession of bitterness than a map of the social world - where emotional labor is often demanded from the least powerful, and where “not dealing” becomes a political strategy as much as a personal one.