Daily Inspiration Quote by John Mortimer

Censorship, Mortimer suggests, is the backhanded compliment no writer asked for: the state doesn’t waste energy muzzling work it believes is harmless. The sly pivot in “should... feel flattered” is pure Mortimer - amused, faintly exasperated, and strategically optimistic. He refuses the posture of the wounded artist and instead frames suppression as evidence that language still has leverage. If the authorities are scared, the page must still be capable of moving people.

The phrase “primitive fear and dread” does heavy lifting. It paints censors not as cool technocrats managing public order, but as anxious guardians performing a superstitious ritual. Mortimer’s subtext is that censorship is less about protecting citizens than protecting power: a knee-jerk impulse to control narratives before narratives control you. By calling print “fearful magic,” he grants writing a kind of irrational potency - not because he’s naive about books toppling regimes overnight, but because he understands how institutions behave when their legitimacy is fragile. They treat words like contraband precisely because words travel cheaply, replicate endlessly, and lodge in private minds where laws can’t follow.

Context matters: Mortimer was a British barrister as well as a novelist and dramatist, steeped in the messy interface between expression and authority. Postwar Britain had its own battles over obscenity, libel, and national security - a legal ecosystem where “respectability” often masqueraded as public interest. His line reads like a courtroom grin: if they’re coming for the ink, the ink is doing its job.