Time & Perspective Quote by Bernard Meltzer

Forgiveness, in Bernard Meltzer's hands, is less a halo than a lever. As a lawyer, he would have lived inside the machinery of blame: facts pinned down, damages quantified, stories cross-examined until the past hardens into record. His line starts by conceding what courts, history, and memory all insist on: you don't get to edit what happened. No amount of moral righteousness rewinds time or resurrects what was lost. That bluntness gives the second clause its kick.

"But you sure do change the future" is doing a lot of work. The casual "sure do" smuggles persuasion into plain speech, like advice offered across a kitchen table rather than from a pulpit. Meltzer's intent isn't to sanctify forgiveness; it's to sell it as strategy. The subtext: holding on to grievance is a form of ongoing self-sentencing. You keep paying interest on someone else's debt, and the payment is time, attention, health, and relationships.

The quote also reframes forgiveness as agency. The injured party can't control the original harm, can't always compel apology, can't guarantee justice. Forgiveness is the one move still available that changes the board position. It doesn't absolve wrongdoing so much as refuse to let it remain the organizing principle of what's next.

In the late-20th-century American self-help orbit, this kind of line travels well because it pairs realism with empowerment: no magical thinking about the past, no indulgence about the future. It's a pragmatic ethic dressed in a neat, repeatable sentence.