Time & Perspective Quote by Leon Uris

The sting here is in the quiet arithmetic of attention: friendship gets whatever’s left over, while conflict receives our full, obsessive focus. Uris isn’t just lamenting busyness; he’s indicting a particular kind of moral procrastination. “No time” sounds like an excuse, almost bureaucratic, the language of overstuffed calendars and good intentions. “All the time in the world,” by contrast, swells into something theatrical and damning. We don’t merely encounter enemies; we make room for them. We schedule our grudges.

As a novelist who wrote at the scale of nations and identity (Exodus, Mila 18), Uris understood how private habits of mind become public history. Communities, like individuals, can neglect the slow work of loyalty and care because it lacks the adrenaline of opposition. Enmity offers clarity: a target, a storyline, a sense of purpose. Friendship is messier. It demands maintenance without the dopamine hit of outrage, and it rarely flatters the ego the way righteous anger does.

The subtext is also self-accusatory: “we” implicates reader and speaker alike, turning a throwaway observation into a social diagnosis. In a culture that treats attention as currency, Uris warns that we’re funding the wrong accounts. The line works because it exposes a perverse efficiency: enemies feel urgent, friends feel safe, and so we starve what sustains us while feeding what corrodes us.