Anger Quote by Colin R. Davis

Temper, in Colin R. Davis's formulation, isn’t a moral failing so much as a resource with a brutally small budget. "Only useful once a year" turns anger into something you ration like an emergency flare: valuable precisely because it’s rare, unmistakable, and hard to ignore. The line works because it refuses the romantic myth of righteous fury as a personality trait. It treats repeated blowups not as passion but as inflation. When you’re always angry, nobody can tell when something actually matters.

The subtext is about credibility. A person who rarely loses their temper carries a kind of social capital; their calm becomes a baseline that others trust. Then, on the one occasion they do crack, it lands as evidence, not noise. The outburst reads less like ego and more like an alarm system finally tripped. Davis is hinting at an almost theatrical logic: restraint builds the stage, and the single eruption becomes the scene everyone remembers.

"Useful" is the tell. This isn’t self-help about serenity; it’s strategy. Temper is framed as an instrument, deployed for effect - to draw a boundary, halt a pattern, expose disrespect, puncture complacency. That makes the quote quietly cynical about workplaces, families, and institutions where polite language can be gamed and patience mistaken for permission. The annual limit is hyperbole, of course, but it sharpens the point: if anger is your default, it’s just weather. If it’s rare, it’s a verdict.