Time & Perspective Quote by Art Buchwald

Buchwald’s line is a neat piece of pragmatic optimism dressed in deadpan realism: he borrows Dickens’s grand binary of history (“best” versus “worst”) only to puncture it with a shrugging punchline. The move is classic Buchwald. He doesn’t deny that things can be bleak or exhilarating; he just refuses to let that drama become an excuse for paralysis, nostalgia, or the eternal American hobby of waiting for “normal” to return.

The intent is less inspirational poster, more civic nudge. By insisting it’s “the only time we’ve got,” he yanks the reader out of armchair commentary and into the unglamorous present tense where choices actually get made. The subtext: your conditions are not a verdict. Catastrophe doesn’t absolve you, and prosperity doesn’t guarantee you’ll use it well. Either way, you’re on the hook.

Context matters because Buchwald’s career was built on satirizing Washington’s self-importance and the media’s appetite for inflated narratives. This line reads like a rebuttal to the political class’s favorite trick: treating every moment as either unprecedented crisis or historic triumph, both of which conveniently justify doing nothing now while promising everything later. It’s also a jab at sentimental time-travel, the kind that idealizes a lost golden age or fetishizes a coming breakthrough.

What makes it work is the compression: two extremes, one blunt constraint. The humor is in the anticlimax; the consequence is in the responsibility it leaves behind.