Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Shaffer

A lesser writer would lob this line as a cheap shot; Shaffer makes it do stage work. “As a race” is the tell: a mock-scientific phrasing that inflates a petty irritation into something grandly prejudicial, exposing the speaker’s own smallness. It’s comedy by overreach. The joke isn’t simply that librarians are “tedious” but that the speaker reaches for the language of bigotry to describe a mild social inconvenience, revealing a worldview primed to categorize and dismiss.

The word “tend” also matters. It’s not a full indictment; it’s the smug, self-protective generalization people use when they want the pleasure of stereotyping without the accountability of being proven wrong. Shaffer, a playwright attuned to power games in polite settings, understands how that kind of phrasing performs superiority. It’s the voice of someone who mistakes impatience for insight.

Contextually, this lands in a 20th-century British cultural ecosystem where “librarian” can stand in for guardianship: of rules, taste, quiet, the archive. Calling them tedious is a complaint against mediation itself, against being told to slow down, to cite, to respect procedure. In drama, those figures often function as friction - the institutional brake placed against a character’s appetite, ego, or urgency.

So the line isn’t really about librarians. It’s about the speaker’s discomfort with restraint and their need to turn that discomfort into a verdict. Shaffer lets the insult boomerang: the tedium on display is the tediousness of the insulter’s mind.