Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s line lands like a drawing-room confession delivered with a perfectly steady voice: calm on the surface, quietly incendiary underneath. “Broadcast” is the tell. He’s not talking about sex in the abstract; he’s talking about publicity, about what happens when private life is dragged into the market square. The shock he predicts isn’t proof that people are uniquely depraved. It’s proof that the social order depends on selective ignorance.

The subtext is less prurient than it is prosecutorial. “Surprise and horror” are the emotions of the respectable spectator, the person who needs vice to stay safely elsewhere in order to keep believing in their own decency. Maugham flips that comfort: the scandal isn’t that a few people have complicated desires, but that almost everyone does. The line works because it makes hypocrisy feel statistically inevitable. Not “some are perverse,” but “normal is a performance maintained by silence.”

Context matters: Maugham was a worldly playwright and novelist moving through a Britain obsessed with propriety and eager to punish deviation, especially queer desire. In an era when exposure could mean ruin, “broadcast” also carries menace; confession is not liberation, it’s vulnerability. Read now, the quote doubles as a critique of our own surveillance culture. Swap the BBC for social media, and Maugham’s point sharpens: the more we pretend transparency is virtue, the more we weaponize it. His cynicism isn’t about sex; it’s about moral theater, and the cruelty of the audience.