Life & Wisdom Quote by Thomas R. Dewar

A joke that lands because it steals the language of a Western shootout and drops it onto the most banal modern battlefield: the street corner. Dewar’s line turns a basic safety warning into a miniature morality play. “Two kinds” is the oldest rhetorical trap in the book, a clean binary that pretends the world is simple so the punchline can hit hard. Then he swaps the expected pair (“quick and the slow”) for “quick and the dead,” borrowing the cadence of “the quick and the dead” from older idiom and pulp myth. The ear recognizes the phrase before the brain catches up, which is exactly how good streetwise humor works: it ambushes you, like traffic.

The intent is partly instructional - hurry up, pay attention - but it’s delivered with a writer’s relish for cruelty. The subtext isn’t just “be careful”; it’s that modern life punishes hesitation. If you’re not brisk, alert, and a little aggressive, the city will quite literally roll over you. That’s why the line feels both funny and faintly accusatory: it casts the victim as someone who failed the pace of the environment.

Context matters: Dewar was writing in an era when cars were remaking public space, and pedestrians were being retrained from owners of the street to obstacles in it. The quip naturalizes that shift. It doesn’t question whether streets should be safer; it jokes that survival requires adapting. Humor becomes a soft form of social discipline: laugh, then look both ways and move.