Daily Inspiration Quote by Abraham Polonsky

"If you don't get killed, it's a lucky day for anybody" lands like a punchline delivered with a bruise behind it. Polonsky, a filmmaker forged in the mid-century churn of war, noir, and blacklisting, isn’t reaching for poetry; he’s stripping the romance out of survival. The line takes the most basic human expectation - staying alive - and reframes it as a windfall. That inversion is the trick: it exposes how quickly a culture can normalize danger until mere continued existence feels like winning the lottery.

Spoken in Polonsky’s world, luck isn’t the cute superstition of gamblers. It’s the only language left when systems are rigged and violence is ambient. The phrasing is deliberately blunt, almost folksy, which makes the cynicism sting more. "For anybody" widens the blast radius: this isn’t a private tragedy or a heroic exception, it’s a shared condition. Everyone is implicated; no one gets to pretend they’re above the bargain.

The subtext reads like a critique of the stories Americans tell themselves - about merit, safety, progress. Polonsky’s characters (and Polonsky himself, hauled through the machinery of suspicion during the Red Scare) often inhabit a reality where moral choices are punished and power writes the rules. In that context, the line becomes a grim ethic: don’t confuse survival with justice, and don’t confuse luck with virtue. It’s not inspirational. It’s diagnostic.