"Instead of loving your enemies - treat your friends a little better"
About this Quote
The jab lands because it flips a sanctified moral command into a piece of practical housekeeping. “Love your enemies” is the kind of advice that sounds noble in sermons and self-help posters, but Howe spots the quiet hypocrisy it can license: the grand gesture toward opponents, performed at a safe emotional distance, while the people actually in your life get the leftovers. The line isn’t anti-forgiveness so much as anti-theater.
Howe’s intent is to puncture performative virtue. “Enemies” are abstractable; you can imagine forgiving them without having to change your habits. “Friends” are inconveniently specific. Treating them better requires attention, patience, and a willingness to be less self-absorbed on ordinary Tuesday nights. The subtext is that many people prefer moral drama to moral maintenance. We’ll fantasize about saintliness toward adversaries while ignoring the small cruelties we routinely inflict on those who stick around.
As a late-19th/early-20th-century American newspaperman and aphorist, Howe worked in a culture steeped in Protestant ethical language, where public virtue could be loudly advertised. His twist reads like a Midwestern corrective to piety: stop chasing the halo effect and start paying your debts where they’re actually due. There’s also a sly social insight here. Enmity can be energizing, even identity-forming; friendship is quieter, easier to neglect, easier to take for granted. Howe’s sentence is a reminder that the real moral test isn’t how magnanimous you sound, but how reliably kind you are to the people who already chose you.
Howe’s intent is to puncture performative virtue. “Enemies” are abstractable; you can imagine forgiving them without having to change your habits. “Friends” are inconveniently specific. Treating them better requires attention, patience, and a willingness to be less self-absorbed on ordinary Tuesday nights. The subtext is that many people prefer moral drama to moral maintenance. We’ll fantasize about saintliness toward adversaries while ignoring the small cruelties we routinely inflict on those who stick around.
As a late-19th/early-20th-century American newspaperman and aphorist, Howe worked in a culture steeped in Protestant ethical language, where public virtue could be loudly advertised. His twist reads like a Midwestern corrective to piety: stop chasing the halo effect and start paying your debts where they’re actually due. There’s also a sly social insight here. Enmity can be energizing, even identity-forming; friendship is quieter, easier to neglect, easier to take for granted. Howe’s sentence is a reminder that the real moral test isn’t how magnanimous you sound, but how reliably kind you are to the people who already chose you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Friendship |
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