Time & Perspective Quote by Christopher Morley

“The enemies of the future are always the very nicest people” lands like a parlor-room compliment that turns into a warning label. Morley, a novelist and essayist with a light touch and a shrewd eye for American manners, is needling a comforting assumption: that danger announces itself with a snarl. His line is built on a sly reversal. “Enemies” primes us for villains; “the very nicest people” replaces the expected monster with the neighbor who brings a casserole and speaks softly at committee meetings.

The intent isn’t to smear kindness; it’s to expose how “nice” can function as social camouflage. Niceness is culturally coded as harmlessness, which makes it a perfect vehicle for power that doesn’t want to look like power. The subtext is about the future being shaped less by obvious bad actors than by well-meaning conformists: people who enforce norms, flatten dissent, and call it “civility.” The threat isn’t malice so much as complacency wearing good manners, the sort of person who opposes the new not out of cruelty but out of comfort, propriety, or a sincere belief that stability equals virtue.

Morley wrote in a period when mass media, corporate life, and organized “respectability” were tightening their grip on public taste. His quip anticipates a familiar modern pattern: the most effective resistance to change often comes packaged as reasonable concern, polite skepticism, or “just asking questions.” By making the future’s adversaries “nice,” Morley points to a harder truth: progress is rarely blocked by cartoon villains; it’s stalled by agreeable people who can’t imagine themselves as the obstacle.