Education Quote by Debra Messing

Messing is doing a careful two-step: defending the right to speak while quietly disowning the authority that fame pretends to confer. The first sentence sounds democratic, almost stubbornly plain - everyone gets an opinion, whether you’re a doctor, a teacher, or “whatever.” That throwaway “whatever” matters. It punctures the hierarchy we instinctively build around credentials and, by extension, around celebrity. She’s flattening the room on purpose.

Then comes the turn: “But unfortunately.” It’s not an apology for having opinions; it’s an indictment of the attention economy that amplifies them. The subtext is a critique of the cultural machinery that treats visibility as expertise. Actors don’t just have platforms; platforms have actors, because celebrity is a ready-made delivery system for messages that the public may be primed to accept uncritically. Her phrasing - “whether we want it or not” - frames fame as a kind of conscription. You can opt out of tweeting, but you can’t fully opt out of being read as influential.

What makes the quote work is how it sidesteps both common traps: the self-righteous celebrity sermon and the anti-celebrity sneer. Messing isn’t begging for deference, and she isn’t doing the false humility routine either. She’s naming the uncomfortable asymmetry: some voices get megaphones for reasons that have nothing to do with wisdom, and everyone else is left negotiating the fallout. It’s a soft-spoken warning about misplaced trust - and about the cultural laziness that makes that trust possible.