Time & Perspective Quote by Lawrence Taylor

Taylor’s line has the blunt, locker-room fatalism of a sport that sells violence as teamwork. “People get hurt” isn’t framed as tragedy or scandal; it’s a weather report. The key move is the shrug embedded in “all the time” and the collective shield of “we.” He’s not defending a single hit so much as defending the ecosystem that makes hits meaningful: the bargain where bodies are spent for wins, contracts, and myth.

The intent is normalization. Taylor, the prototype of the modern edge-rushing terror, is telling you that pain isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of football; it’s a feature, woven into its entertainment value and its internal code of masculinity. “Part of what we do” turns injury into job description, a professional hazard like a firefighter’s burns. That phrasing matters because it reassigns responsibility: if harm is inherent, then no one is uniquely at fault, and moral outrage becomes naïve, even intrusive.

The subtext is also self-protection. Stars like Taylor built reputations on crossing the line between aggression and damage; admitting football’s violence as negotiable would retroactively put their careers on trial. So the sentence functions as preemptive absolution: don’t ask for apologies, don’t ask for rule changes, don’t ask for a softer game that would make the old heroics look uglier.

Contextually, it lands in the long arc from “shake it off” football to the concussion era. Today, with CTE lawsuits and highlight reels re-edited as evidence, the quote reads less like toughness and more like an artifact of denial: a culture explaining away harm right as the bill is coming due.