Daily Inspiration Quote by Bette Midler

Midler’s line lands like a backstage confession that turns into a civic warning. “Scares the pants off me” is deliberately unglamorous: a vaudeville-ish, body-level idiom from a performer who knows how crowds behave when the lights go up. The humor isn’t there to soften the message so much as to smuggle it past our defenses. If you laugh, you’re already listening.

Her real target is the seductive comfort of belonging. “Group conformity” sounds harmless until she frames it as a “prelude to cruelty,” a phrase that treats social pressure not as etiquette but as choreography for harm. The cruelty isn’t random; it’s procedural. First comes the invitation to comply, then the permission structure to punish anyone who won’t or can’t. That “can’t” matters. Midler isn’t only defending the contrarian; she’s pointing to the people structurally excluded by the terms of membership: the odd, the disabled, the poor, the queer, the outspoken, the socially awkward - anyone for whom “just join in” is a lie.

“Big Parade” is the masterstroke: conformity as pageant, the kind of public celebration that doubles as a loyalty test. Parades are noisy, patriotic, wholesome - and that’s the danger. They make coercion feel like festivity. Coming from an actress who built a career on outsized individuality and camp defiance, the context is showbiz and politics at once: a reminder that mass applause can be indistinguishable from a mob warming up. The intent isn’t to reject community; it’s to expose how quickly community becomes a costume department for exclusion.