Daily Inspiration Quote by Brendan Behan

A joke with a bruise under it: Behan’s line turns “mixed” into a deliberately wrong, almost babyish category, and that misfit phrasing is the point. He isn’t earnestly wishing for a new identity; he’s mocking the petty, bureaucratic ways societies sort people into tidy boxes - Catholic/Protestant, Irish/English, respectable/degenerate - and then punish them for landing on the “wrong” side. By saying “mixed infant,” he drags the whole serious apparatus of ethnic and sectarian purity down into the nursery, where it looks as ridiculous as it is consequential.

The specific intent is to weaponize self-deprecation. Behan, a Dublin dramatist with IRA entanglements and a public persona built on bruising candor, knew how to disarm an audience with humor that also indicts them. The subtext is envy, but not of hybridity as a lifestyle brand; envy of the loophole. A “mixed” person can, in theory, slip between warring camps, claim partial belonging, refuse total allegiance. In mid-century Ireland and Britain, where identity often arrived pre-loaded with suspicion, that possibility reads like freedom.

It also carries a darker comic charge: he’s implying that being “pure” is a trap you don’t consent to, a fate assigned at birth. The infant detail makes the politics intimate. You don’t choose the labels, you inherit them - and then spend adulthood paying their tab.