Aging & Wisdom Quote by Paddy Chayefsky

There is no polite way to take empire seriously, Chayefsky implies, without also taking its violence personally. The line is built like a slap: first the blunt charge of material theft ("plundered half the world"), then the moral accounting ("for your own profit"), then the real target - the soothing story we tell afterward. "Let's not pass it off" is theater-speak disguised as debate etiquette: a controlled, almost conversational phrase used to detonate a national self-myth.

Chayefsky, a playwright with a nose for institutional hypocrisy, aims at the rhetorical laundering that turns extraction into ideals. The "Age of Enlightenment" functions here less as a historical period than as a brand name, a respectable label that lets power look principled. By yoking Enlightenment language to plunder, he spotlights the contradiction at the heart of Western self-celebration: liberty and reason preached at home, coercion and commerce enforced abroad. The accusation isn't that Enlightenment thought was fake; it's that invoking it can become a convenient alibi.

The subtext is also about who gets to narrate history. "You British" is a second-person indictment meant to collapse distance - not "the Empire" in abstract, but a living inheritance of prestige, museums, and schoolroom pride. It's an attack on nostalgia as political cover, the kind that treats colonial brutality as a regrettable footnote to a glorious civilizational arc. Chayefsky's intent is to make the footnote the headline, and to make any refined conversation about "progress" feel, for a moment, like complicity.