Time & Perspective Quote by Edward Albee

Albee’s line lands like a stage whisper that’s loud enough to rattle the balcony: democracy sells itself as a vending machine of desires, then hands you a mirror. The first sentence flatters the audience with the familiar civic romance: in a democracy, “we can have anything we want.” It’s the language of consumer choice, not collective responsibility, and that’s the trap. Albee knows how quickly “want” replaces “need,” how politics gets treated as a menu and citizenship as a subscription.

The pivot is the dagger: “at the same time.” No comfortingly linear cause-and-effect, just simultaneity. Freedom and consequence aren’t alternating beats; they’re synced. The subtext is less moralistic than accusatory: if the outcomes are rotten, it’s not because democracy failed in some abstract way, but because the public’s appetites, attention span, and willingness to be lied to shaped the result. “Exactly what we deserve” is an ugly phrase because it denies the alibi of innocence. It refuses the idea that the system is something that merely happens to us.

As a dramatist, Albee is allergic to self-congratulation. His work pries at bourgeois myths and the stories people tell to stay comfortable. This quote does the same to the civic sphere: it suggests democracy isn’t a guarantee of justice, only a mechanism that amplifies whatever a society habitually rewards - demagogues, complacency, spectacle, or, on better days, courage. The intent isn’t to sneer at democracy so much as to indict the audience for treating it like entertainment instead of authorship.