Daily Inspiration Quote by James Reston

Reston’s line is optimism with its halo yanked off. It doesn’t cheerlead; it recruits. “Stick with” is practical advice from a working journalist: pick your company, your sources of morale, your interpretive frame. Not because optimists are correct, but because reality is already a grinding opponent. The killer turn is the conditional: “even if they’re right.” Optimism, in this formulation, isn’t a rosy lie; it’s the least-punishing version of the truth. If the best-case scenario is still “tough enough,” then pessimism becomes a kind of indulgence, a luxury belief that adds emotional interest to an already expensive bill.

The subtext is a newsroom temperament shaped by decades of covering wars, elections, assassinations, and the slow-motion failures of institutions. Reston, a New York Times columnist through much of the Cold War, watched public life run on cycles of panic and certainty. His warning aims less at naivete than at the corrosive glamour of doom. Pessimism flatters the speaker: it signals sophistication, immunity to disappointment, membership in the club that “sees things as they are.” Reston punctures that pose with a blunt cost-benefit analysis: cynicism doesn’t protect you from the hard part; it just makes you show up exhausted.

The line works because it reframes optimism as discipline, not temperament. It’s not “believe everything will be fine.” It’s “choose the mindset that keeps you functional when fine isn’t on offer.” In an age where catastrophe competes for clicks, Reston’s advice reads like media hygiene: don’t let the darkest interpretation be your default soundtrack.