Daily Inspiration Quote by Abraham Polonsky

A line like this lands with a sting because it weaponizes common sense. On its face, Abraham Polonsky is just voicing thrift: don’t toss what still has value. But the phrasing is deliberately moralistic - “must never” turns a household rule into a commandment - and the real subject isn’t clutter, it’s conscience. “Worth good money” is the tell: value gets reduced to cash, and the cash gets treated as the only serious measure of worth. Polonsky’s intent is less advice than exposure. He’s showing how capitalist logic colonizes everyday decisions until the language of “good money” becomes a substitute for judgment.

That’s classic Polonsky, a filmmaker and screenwriter whose work (and life) was shaped by labor politics and the Hollywood blacklist. In that environment, the marketplace wasn’t an abstraction; it was a tribunal deciding who got to work, who got erased, and what stories were allowed to exist. The quote plays like a miniature of that pressure: keep what can be monetized, discard what can’t. Under the surface sits a crueler corollary - people, principles, and relationships become “things” only protected if they can justify their price.

The line also has a director’s ear for dialogue. It sounds like something a character says to rationalize compromise, to dress up self-interest as prudence. Polonsky’s subtext is that this kind of sentence is how a society teaches itself to stop asking harder questions: not “Is it right?” but “Is it worth anything?”