Daily Inspiration Quote by Edward Bond

Edward Bond’s line is a small rhetorical grenade: it takes the warm, socially approved word “good” and strips it of its halo. “Good” reads here as personal virtue, private decency, the kind of moral self-care that lets you sleep at night while the world stays arranged exactly as it was. Bond, a playwright forged in postwar Britain and famous for theatre that courts discomfort, is allergic to that bargain. The sentence doesn’t reject ethics; it rejects ethics that end at the individual.

The trick is the blunt, almost sermon-like construction: “we are not... but...” It sounds like a correction delivered to an audience that has been congratulating itself. Bond’s theatre often stages violence and injustice not to revel in shock but to argue that “goodness” can become a sedative. If you can label yourself good, you can stop asking what your goodness costs other people. The subtext is accusatory: morality that doesn’t alter conditions is functionally collaboration.

“Change it” is deliberately unsentimental. Not “understand,” not “heal,” not “make peace,” but change: an active verb that implies conflict, consequences, and a willingness to be judged. In the context of Bond’s work - anti-complacent, politically charged, suspicious of bourgeois comfort - the line doubles as an artistic manifesto. Theatre, for him, isn’t a chapel for tasteful feelings; it’s a pressure system designed to produce action. The provocation lands because it dares the audience to trade innocence for responsibility, and hints that being “good” might be the easiest way to avoid doing anything at all.