Time & Perspective Quote by Lillian Smith

Faith here isnt Sunday-morning piety; its a wager placed in public, with collateral. Lillian Smith frames belief as an act that precedes proof, then sharpens it: you dont just hold the idea, you underwrite it with your life. That verb is doing heavy work. Underwriting belongs to insurance and finance, worlds that pretend risk can be priced. Smith flips it into an ethical register: the only guarantee that matters is what youre willing to lose for a future you cant yet document.

The intent is both personal and political. As a Southern novelist and anti-segregation voice writing against the polite fatalism of Jim Crow, Smith understood how power hides behind the demand for proof: prove you deserve equality, prove change wont disrupt order, prove the future before youre allowed to build it. Her line rejects that trap. Progress, in her view, is not a courtroom where the oppressed must present evidence; its a frontier where someone has to step first, and stepping first costs.

The subtext is a rebuke to spectatorship. Its easy to endorse justice as an abstract direction of history, easier still to wait for inevitability to do the work. Smith insists the future stays open only when people refuse to outsource courage to time. The phrase "leave the future open" carries a quiet warning: closure is what systems of domination crave. Certainty, precedent, proof - theyre how a violent present launders itself into permanence. Smiths sentence is a key meant to keep the lock from clicking shut.