Daily Inspiration Quote by Douglas William Jerrold

Truth, in Jerrold's line, isn't a radiant ideal; she's a woman stuck in a hallway, coat on, watching the door that never opens. That small personification does a lot of dirty work. By giving truth a gender and a temperament - patient, long-suffering, familiar with neglect - Jerrold turns a moral abstraction into social commentary: truth doesn't lose because it's fragile, but because the world has trained itself to postpone her indefinitely.

The wit lands in the quiet cruelty of "used to it". It's not the thunderclap of censorship or tyranny; it's the everyday habit of delay. Institutions can praise truth loudly while still keeping her on hold. The line implies a culture where convenience, reputation, and profit are always more urgent than accuracy, and where "later" becomes a respectable synonym for "never". Jerrold, a dramatist working in a 19th-century Britain obsessed with manners, press squabbles, and political theater, understood that public life often runs on performance: the appearance of sincerity, the choreography of outrage, the careful timing of revelations.

There's also a sting of complicity. If truth is "used to it", then everyone else is, too. The audience knows the script: inconvenient facts get deferred until they are harmless, or until someone else pays the cost of saying them. Jerrold makes that delay feel shameful not by preaching, but by showing how normal we've made it - a world so practiced at sidelining truth that even truth has adjusted her expectations.