Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary McCarthy

“Realistic” is McCarthy’s acid test for moral retreat: a word that arrives wearing the respectability of grown-up judgment, then quietly hands you the bill for whatever cruelty comes next. Her line works because it exposes a social tactic we still recognize. People don’t announce, “I’m about to act selfishly.” They announce, “I’m being realistic,” and the adjective performs the laundering. It reframes harm as necessity, and necessity as maturity.

McCarthy, a novelist and critic with a radar for bourgeois euphemism, understood that the dirtiest choices are often sold as practical ones. “Realistic decision” implies a rejection of “idealism,” but her point is that idealism is rarely the true alternative on offer. The real contrast is between accountability and escape. Calling a decision “realistic” pre-emptively scolds anyone who might object, casting them as naive, sentimental, unserious. It’s a rhetorical move that shifts the debate from ethics to temperament.

The joke is sharp because it lands on an old American faith: that reality is the domain of hardheaded men, budgets, and power, while morality is a luxury for those who don’t understand how the world works. McCarthy flips that hierarchy. In her framing, “realism” becomes the alibi language of institutions, relationships, and politics when they’re about to betray their stated values. The line doesn’t condemn compromise; it indicts the self-congratulatory pose that turns compromise into permission.