Daily Inspiration Quote by William Ralph Inge

Public opinion is cast here not as a democratic feedback loop but as a bully in a crowd: faceless, loud, and convinced it has moral standing precisely because it has numbers. Inge’s phrasing is doing aggressive rhetorical work. “Vulgar” and “impertinent” make taste and manners the battleground; this isn’t just disagreement, it’s social coarsening. Calling it “anonymous” is the knife twist: the power to wound without accountability, the cruelty of the comment section avant la lettre. Then comes “tyrant,” a deliberately paradoxical term for something supposedly born of the people. Inge wants you to feel the inversion: the many can govern like a despot when consensus hardens into coercion.

The most revealing subtext is in “deliberately makes life unpleasant.” Public opinion isn’t merely a weather system you endure; it has intent. The collective doesn’t just drift toward mediocrity, it polices the perimeter of the acceptable, punishing anyone who refuses to “content” themselves “to the average person.” That last phrase is slightly off-kilter, and it matters: it suggests the average is not a statistical midpoint but a moral demand, a standard of proper contentment. Be satisfied with what satisfies everyone else.

Context sharpens the edge. As an Anglican cleric writing in an era of mass newspapers, expanding suffrage, and middlebrow cultural authority, Inge is diagnosing modern conformity as a spiritual problem: the crowd’s judgment masquerading as virtue. It’s less an elitist sneer than a warning that social consensus can become a substitute for conscience, and that the cost is paid by anyone trying to live at a sharper pitch than “normal.”