Daily Inspiration Quote by Bernard Levin

Belief, Levin reminds us, is less a conclusion than a craving. The line lands with that quietly lethal journalist’s talent: it doesn’t argue with the falsehood so much as diagnose the audience. “Manifest absurdity” is doing double work here. It suggests not just that the claim is wrong, but that it is obviously, publicly, almost comically wrong - the kind of wrongness you can point at. And yet even that level of exposure “could deter” no one who “wanted to believe.” The verb wanted is the knife. Levin shifts the center of gravity from evidence to desire, from facts to identity.

The subtext is an indictment of a particular modern vanity: the idea that people are persuaded by information. Levin’s sentence assumes the opposite. When the belief offers comfort, tribal belonging, moral licensing, or a narrative that flatters one’s fears, absurdity becomes a feature, not a bug. If anything, the sheer ridiculousness can function as a loyalty test: you prove you’re in by swallowing what outsiders won’t.

As context, Levin wrote in an era when British public life was learning, again and again, that scandal and contradiction don’t automatically end careers or movements. His journalistic eye was trained on propaganda, partisan mythmaking, and the way media repetition can launder nonsense into familiarity. The line’s sting is its austerity: no melodrama, no villain. Just a sober acknowledgment that the strongest engine of credulity is not deception, but appetite.