Daily Inspiration Quote by Dennis Potter

A line like this sounds almost too tidy until you remember Dennis Potter built his career on mess: compromised bodies, compromised institutions, and the brutal intimacy of private choices. "I believe everybody is responsible for what they do themselves" isn’t a warm moral slogan; it’s a sharpened refusal of excuses. Potter is drawing a hard boundary around agency, insisting that even in a world rigged by class, illness, and media manipulation, the final ownership of an act still lands on the person who commits it.

The phrasing does quiet work. "I believe" flags it as conviction rather than doctrine, the sort of principle you cling to because the alternative is terrifying: that no one is accountable, that harm is just weather. "What they do themselves" narrows the claim to the irreducible moment of action. He’s not pretending circumstances don’t exist; he’s insisting they don’t get the last word. That distinction is pure Potter: he loved systems as targets, but he didn’t let individuals off the hook for hiding inside them.

Context matters. Potter wrote in postwar Britain, in the long shadow of bureaucracy, broadcasting, and respectability politics, where responsibility is constantly outsourced: to the state, to the job, to "that’s just how it was". His dramas repeatedly show how seductive that outsourcing can be. The intent here is to booby-trap that comfort. If you’re responsible for what you do, then the violence of everyday complicity isn’t abstract; it’s personal, and it’s immediate.

It’s also a dare to the audience. Don’t moralize at characters from a safe seat. Ask what you’ve normalized, and what you’ve chosen.