Daily Inspiration Quote by Janet Suzman

Suzman’s line carries the wary optimism of someone who has watched ideals get chewed up by history. As a South African actress who lived through apartheid and its afterlife, she’s not selling a rainbow-nation slogan; she’s sketching the messy mechanics of coexistence. The key move is her insistence on “expertises” - a slightly awkward plural that matters. It implies difference won’t be erased or sentimentalized. Black and white South Africans have been forced into radically uneven roles; “feeding each other’s” skills imagines an exchange that finally isn’t extraction.

The phrase “fits and starts” is doing the heavy lifting. It refuses the neat arc of reconciliation narratives and admits that progress will be intermittent, reversible, and exhausting. That’s not cynicism so much as lived realism: democracy as a stop-start engine rather than a victorious parade.

Then comes the pivot: “at least it has a great constitution now to back it up.” Suzman anchors hope in an institution, not in goodwill. Subtext: harmony can’t depend on personal enlightenment, because power has always found ways to rationalize itself. A constitution, especially South Africa’s post-1994 document celebrated for its rights framework, becomes the guardrail when the culture fails its own aspirations.

As an actress, Suzman also understands performance - the difference between public scripts and private behavior. The quote reads like an anti-script: no triumphant ending, just a commitment to a shared stage where the rules are better, even if the cast keeps forgetting its lines.