War & Peace Quote by Walter Winchell

Winchell’s line lands like a cocktail-party toast and a threat at the same time: survival, he implies, isn’t about moral cleanliness but about memory management. “Get along” sounds neighborly, even soothing, yet the method he offers is pure hard-edged urban politics. Never forgive an enemy: keep the ledger open, keep leverage close, keep your guard up. Never forget a friend: treat loyalty as currency, repay it, and bank it for the next storm.

The subtext is Winchell’s world - mid-century American media where reputation was both weapon and hostage. As a journalist and radio gossip powerhouse, he helped invent the modern attention economy: feuds made copy, alliances made access, and “forgiveness” could read as weakness or amnesia. In that ecosystem, magnanimity isn’t noble; it’s strategically expensive. The aphorism doubles as advice and self-justification, a neat ethical alibi for staying sharp, staying suspicious, staying connected.

What makes it work is the deliberate inversion of expected virtue. We’re trained to admire forgiveness and to dismiss grudges as petty. Winchell flips the script, arguing that grudges are protective and gratitude is practical. Even the parallel structure is telling: “enemy” and “friend” aren’t emotions; they’re categories. People are sorted, tracked, and remembered accordingly.

Read now, it feels like a proto-social-media rule: keep receipts on your haters, keep tabs on your network. It’s a cynical line, but also a revealing one - less about hatred than about power, and the costs of pretending power doesn’t matter.