Daily Inspiration Quote by Peter Shaffer

Shaffer’s line lands like a polite slap at modern faith in expertise: we can anesthetize desire, but we can’t prescribe it. The wit isn’t in a punchline so much as in the asymmetry. “Destroyed” is blunt, almost clinical; “created” is airy, impossible. By yoking passion to a “doctor,” Shaffer targets the respectable institutions that promise to fix us, normalize us, make us safe. The joke is that they often succeed - just not in the way we like to admit.

The subtext is less anti-medicine than anti-reduction. In Shaffer’s theatre, what’s most alive in people is usually what makes them difficult: obsession, devotion, erotic heat, holy terror. A doctor, standing in for psychiatry, bureaucracy, even well-meaning family intervention, can label that intensity as pathology and apply treatment: sedate, therapize, domesticate. That’s “destruction” as a social service. The line insists that passion is not a mechanical function you can switch on; it’s an unruly gift, tied to mystery, risk, and sometimes damage.

Contextually, it echoes the moral argument running through plays like Equus, where “curing” a boy of ecstatic fixation may return him to normal life at the cost of his radiance. Shaffer’s intent is to force a choice we’d rather outsource: do we want peace, or do we want fire? The sting is that society prefers people who are manageable, even if that means extinguishing the one thing that makes them feel real.