Daily Inspiration Quote by A. P. Herbert

Domestic bliss gets skewered here not with cruelty, but with a patrician grin. A. P. Herbert’s line is engineered to puncture the smug Victorian-afterglow idea that a “good” marriage is one that never raises its voice. The joke lands because it flips the expected moral: instead of praising harmony, it treats unbroken peace as evidence of dulled character. If you can go 25 years without a serious dispute, Herbert implies, you’re not enlightened - you’re anesthetized.

Calling such people “sheep” does more than name docility. It invokes herd life: safety purchased at the price of individuality, conflict avoided by surrendering judgment. The subtext isn’t that constant fighting is healthy; it’s that real intimacy has friction, because real people have edges. Dispute becomes a proxy for selfhood. The barb is aimed at a particular kind of respectable couple performance, where “getting on” is less about mutual understanding than about one partner swallowing their appetite, ambitions, or anger.

Herbert’s statesman label matters, but not because this is policy. It’s civic satire smuggled through the living room. A liberal-era parliamentarian who cared about law and public hypocrisy, Herbert understood how “peace” can be invoked to sanctify the status quo. In that light, the marriage quip reads like a miniature theory of democracy: disagreement isn’t a moral failure; it’s evidence that two minds are still alive, still separate, still capable of saying no.