Daily Inspiration Quote by Renata Adler

Adler is aiming her dart at a culture that loves “quality of life” talk right up until it has to account for the people who complicate the brochure. The line is engineered to sound like civic common sense, then it quietly flips the measurement: stop counting restaurants, parks, or crime stats; look at who gets labeled “mentally unwell,” by whom, and what happens to them. If the community’s self-image is polished, its treatment of the unstable is where the varnish cracks.

The quote’s sting comes from its double authorship of madness: “people who regard themselves” versus those “whom the consensus chooses to regard” that way. Adler isn’t only describing suffering; she’s describing a social process. Mental illness becomes both lived experience and communal verdict. That split lets her suggest what polite discourse often dodges: diagnostic language can be a lifeline, but it can also function as a civic tool for managing discomfort, pushing certain kinds of pain, eccentricity, addiction, or dissent out of sight.

As a journalist steeped in institutions and their hypocrisies, Adler is attentive to who gets protected by euphemism and who gets policed by it. “Consensus” is the key villain here: not an individual bigot, but the soft tyranny of shared assumptions, the neighborhood meeting, the editorial tone, the “just being realistic” vibe. The community’s true “quality” is revealed in its tolerance for disorder, its capacity for care, and its willingness to let the unwell remain visible citizens rather than problems to be relocated.