Daily Inspiration Quote by Tom Stoppard

Responsibilities in Stoppard's line behave like physics: they "gravitate" toward mass, not merit. The verb choice is the tell. Gravity isn't a moral system; it's indifferent, automatic, even a little cruel. In offices, families, movements, and crises, tasks drift toward the person with competence, calm, or stamina, until capability becomes a kind of trap. Stoppard compresses a whole social dynamic into a clean metaphor: institutions offload their burdens onto the reliable, then congratulate themselves for having "leaders."

The intent feels characteristically Stoppardian: lucid enough to sound like common sense, sharp enough to sting. It's not motivational poster optimism about stepping up. It's a warning about how responsibility accumulates, how virtue gets punished by being used. "Can shoulder them" is bodily language, workman's language, suggesting weight and wear, not prestige. The competent person isn't crowned; they're loaded.

Subtextually, it challenges the romance of fairness. People like to imagine responsibility being assigned through deliberation, titles, or justice. Stoppard implies it's assigned the way water finds the lowest point: through ease. The person who can handle it becomes the path of least resistance. Everyone else's abdication gets laundered as practicality.

Context matters, too. Stoppard spent a career dramatizing systems - political, philosophical, theatrical - and the way language prettifies power. This line could sit in a drawing-room comedy or a political play; either way, it exposes an unglamorous truth about modern life: competence attracts duty, and duty, unattended, keeps coming back for more.