Promises are like crying babies in a theater, they should be carried out at once.

The quip uses a comic simile to argue that promises create an immediate moral and social obligation: once made, they demand prompt action rather than delay. Like a crying baby disrupting a theater, an unfulfilled promise becomes increasingly intrusive—nagging the promisor’s conscience, eroding trust, and disturbing the “performance” of ordinary life and relationships. The line reflects Peale’s broader emphasis on practical ethics and character-building: reliability is not merely a virtue but a discipline, and postponement is portrayed as the enemy of integrity. Its punchline also implies that the responsible response is not to ignore the disturbance but to remove its cause through follow-through.