Daily Inspiration Quote by Dennis Potter

Adulthood gets sold as a kind of upgrade: more data, better judgment, fewer mistakes. Dennis Potter punctures that fantasy with a line that’s both modest and damning. Yes, adults accumulate knowledge, but not the kind that reliably prevents harm. The punch lands in the turn from “we” to “People”: he starts with communal self-implication, then widens the indictment to society at large, as if to say the problem isn’t just individual ignorance, it’s a culture that mistakes competence for conscience.

Potter’s phrasing is deliberately plain, almost shruggy, which makes the accusation sharper. “We don’t know enough” isn’t a call for trivia; it’s a rebuke of moral overconfidence. The subtext is that adulthood often comes with institutional authority (parent, boss, voter, policymaker) that magnifies small failures of empathy into real damage. “Unthinkingly callous” is the key: cruelty doesn’t have to be theatrical. It can be casual, automated, a reflex produced by busyness, class habits, professional detachment, or the psychic self-defense of not wanting to feel too much.

As a dramatist, Potter is attuned to how harm happens in rooms, not manifestos: families, hospitals, offices, bureaucracies. His work often challenged the pieties of respectability, and this line carries that suspicion. It suggests that what’s most frightening isn’t the villain who knows he’s hurting you, but the ordinary adult who believes they’re being reasonable while they’re quietly dehumanizing someone. The intent is bracing: grow up, yes, but don’t confuse maturity with mercy.