Daily Inspiration Quote by Dennis Potter

Potter’s warning lands like a diagnosis: in the wrong hands, feeling isn’t wisdom, it’s a weapon you can turn on yourself. “Instant access” sounds like a convenience feature, the emotional equivalent of fast food or remote control. That’s the bite of it. He’s not condemning emotion; he’s skewering the fantasy that immediacy equals authenticity. If you can reach your feelings on demand, you can also skip the friction that makes them intelligible: hesitation, reflection, the slow discovery of what you actually think.

As a dramatist, Potter knew that raw emotion is rarely the most truthful thing on stage. Drama works through delay and shape. Characters don’t just feel; they misread what they feel, narrate it, rehearse it, weaponize it. “Dangerous” points to that manipulative edge: instant emotional access can become instant emotional performance, a way to justify any impulse with the authority of sincerity. It’s the rhetoric of “I feel, therefore I’m right.”

The line also fits Potter’s broader preoccupations with memory, illness, and mediated experience. Late-20th-century Britain was already thick with new channels, new therapies, new confessional modes. Today it reads eerily predictive: we carry devices that let us broadcast moods at the speed of thought, then watch them echoed back as identity. Potter’s subtext is sternly humanistic. Emotion matters, but it matures in the gap between stimulus and response. Remove that gap and you don’t get truth; you get volatility with a microphone.