Life & Mortality Quote by John French Sloan

Politeness has a time stamp, and Sloan is daring you to notice how quickly it expires. The line lands as a joke, but it’s really a small indictment of cultural etiquette: we sanctify people the moment they’re safely gone, then pretend our praise is moral rather than convenient. By flipping the standard rule - don’t speak ill of the dead - Sloan exposes its hypocrisy. We don’t “have to” speak well of them because they were good; we do it because the dead can’t answer back, and because communities like clean endings.

Coming from an artist, the barb cuts closer to the machinery of reputation. Art worlds are famously posthumous: careers are validated by retrospectives, obituaries, and market corrections that arrive too late to matter to the person who made the work. Sloan’s quip reads like a protest against that delayed generosity. If criticism is inevitable, he suggests, at least make it honest and timely. “Knock them while they’re alive” isn’t a call to cruelty so much as a demand for real engagement: argue with the living, challenge them, refuse the lazy halo we hand out at funerals.

The subtext is also self-protective. Sloan, associated with the Ashcan School’s unsentimental realism, knew what it meant to be dismissed in the present and embalmed in the future. The line dares patrons, critics, and polite society to stop outsourcing courage to the obituary page.