Daily Inspiration Quote by Dennis Potter

“Ideals jump across the hierarchies of the printed word” is Potter refusing to treat literature as a polite, ranked staircase. The line has the snap of someone who spent his career watching culture get sorted into “serious” and “popular,” “high” and “low,” as if meaning were a property of the binding rather than the reader’s nerve endings.

Potter’s phrasing does two things at once. “Hierarchies” names the gatekeeping infrastructure: critics, syllabi, publishers, bookshop tables, the invisible etiquette that tells you what counts. “Jump” is the insurgent verb. Ideals don’t climb, don’t apply for entry, don’t wait their turn. They vault. That image smuggles in a democratic theory of art: the best, most contagious ideas migrate across forms and audiences because they’re portable, not because they’ve been certified.

As a dramatist working in television - a medium routinely patronized in Potter’s era as disposable mass entertainment - he had skin in this argument. His work (and public stance) kept insisting that lyricism, philosophy, and moral ferocity could live inside formats considered “lesser.” The subtext is a jab at the way print culture confers prestige by scarcity and difficulty, while ignoring how people actually receive and reuse ideas: in fragments, quotations, scenes, songs, reruns, gossip. Ideals are not loyal to their containers.

Potter also hints at danger. If ideals can leap barriers, so can propaganda. The line’s elegance is its warning: once an idea is loosed into language, the class system of culture can’t reliably control where it lands.