Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Shaffer

Blaming your parents is the modern alibi that never expires, and Shaffer’s line catches that habit with a playwright’s ear for social self-deception. It’s a dry, almost offhand observation, but the bite is in “nowadays” and “tend to”: he’s not condemning trauma or family damage, he’s skewering a fashionable reflex. The phrasing suggests a cultural shift from tragedy to paperwork, from moral struggle to causation-as-excuse. In other words, explanation has started masquerading as exoneration.

Shaffer came of age alongside the rise of popular psychotherapy and the postwar boom in self-narration: talk shows, confessional memoir, the therapeutic language that filters into everyday conversation. His theater often stages the collision between primal desire and civilized rationalization. Think of characters who want something unbearable, then scramble for a story that makes it acceptable. In that light, parental blame becomes a convenient script: it converts messy adult responsibility into an inherited injury with clear villains and tidy origin points.

The line also implies a quieter critique of modern individualism. If every failure is traceable to upbringing, adulthood becomes less a threshold than a permanent appeal. Shaffer’s intent isn’t to deny the family’s power; it’s to question what we do with that knowledge. The subtext: we’re confusing insight with growth, diagnosis with destiny. As drama, it’s sharp because it hints at a paradox audiences recognize in themselves - the craving to be understood, and the temptation to let being understood stand in for changing.