Daily Inspiration Quote by Kingsley Amis

Amis doesn’t just insult journalists; he stages a bleak promotion ceremony. Incompetence, once the profession’s reliable vice, has been “displaced” by laziness - a word that carries moral rot as much as professional failure. Incompetence can be accidental, even pitiable: people try and fall short. Laziness implies choice. It’s the sharper accusation because it suggests journalism isn’t merely getting things wrong; it’s deciding not to care enough to get them right.

The line works because of its faux-administrative framing. “Chief characteristic” sounds like something from a mission statement or a personnel review, as if the newsroom has formally updated its values. That deadpan bureaucratic tone is the joke and the knife: a cultural critic pretending to be a manager, calmly noting the decline. It’s classic Amis - clipped, English, and mean in a way that doubles as craftsmanship.

The subtext also targets the mechanics of modern media: the routinization of takes, the temptation of easy narrative, the copy-and-paste metabolism of opinion. Laziness here isn’t physical idleness; it’s intellectual shortcutting - failing to read, failing to verify, failing to imagine complexity when a premade script will do. Amis, a novelist with an ear for the exact word, is defending attention as an ethical practice. Journalism’s sin, in this formulation, isn’t error. It’s incuriosity.

Contextually, it lands in a late-20th-century Britain where mass media was expanding and coarsening, and where literary figures often treated the press as both necessary and parasitic. Amis turns that grievance into a maxim: a one-line diagnosis that’s funny because it’s structured like progress, and chilling because it describes regression with professional pride.