Daily Inspiration Quote by Howard Lindsay

Every so often, we pass laws repealing human nature is the kind of line that lands like a rimshot and then keeps echoing. Howard Lindsay, a producer with a showman’s ear for how audiences recognize themselves, compresses a whole civic tragedy into one sly premise: lawmakers periodically behave as if desire, fear, pride, and self-interest are clerical errors that can be corrected with ink.

The wit comes from the verb repealing. We repeal statutes, not instincts. By swapping the objects, Lindsay exposes a familiar political habit: moral or social panic dressed up as governance. It’s not anti-law so much as anti-pretension. The target isn’t regulation that manages harm; it’s the recurring fantasy that you can legislate away the parts of people that make them people, then act surprised when reality refuses to comply.

Subtext: the law is often less a tool for order than a performance of control. These are the moments when the symbolic win matters more than workable outcomes, when policy becomes a public vow of purity, discipline, or certainty. Prohibition is the obvious historical reference point, but the joke travels: sex, drugs, censorship, vice, even the attempt to outlaw complex identities through bureaucratic definitions. Such laws don’t fail quietly; they create black markets, selective enforcement, and hypocrisy - all very human results.

Lindsay’s context as a Broadway-world operator matters. Producers live by the gap between script and behavior, between the idealized character and the messy actor. He’s warning that politics, at its most theatrical, confuses stage directions for psychology - and mistakes applause for compliance.