Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Bond

Bond lands the punch by making the familiar sound sinister. “Private objectives” is bureaucratic phrasing, the kind of bland civic language that’s supposed to reassure you. He uses it to describe a moral shrinkage: the citizen recast as a lone operator. The line “It’s called competition” is pure playwright’s tactic - a sudden, deadpan naming that exposes how ideology hides in plain sight, packaged as common sense. Then the trap snaps shut: “competition is antagonism.” Not “can become,” not “sometimes produces.” Is.

The intent is less to complain about selfishness than to indict a system that trains people to experience one another as obstacles. Bond’s subtext is theatrical: society isn’t a neutral backdrop; it’s an author of behavior. If people are “asked” to seek personal ends, someone is doing the asking - institutions, employers, schools, the state. That passive construction matters. It implies coercion without a visible tyrant, which is exactly how market logic prefers to operate: as weather, not politics.

Contextually, Bond comes out of postwar Britain, when the promise of collective provision (welfare state, public housing, unions) met the later hard turn toward market fundamentalism. His plays relentlessly stage the violence that polite language denies. Here, the violence is social rather than physical: competition normalizes suspicion, turns solidarity into inefficiency, makes community feel naive. Bond’s provocation is that antagonism isn’t a tragic side effect of modern life; it’s the operating system. The discomfort you feel reading it is the point - he wants “competition” to stop sounding like motivation and start sounding like a weapon.