Daily Inspiration Quote by John Grierson

A genteel warning dressed as a diagnosis: if you train your feelings as a private hobby, you may be grooming yourself for irrelevance. Grierson’s phrasing is doing double duty. “Cultivation of sensibility” sounds like the respectable liberal project - refine the self, deepen empathy, become discerning. Then he snaps the hinge: “purely personal lines” turns that refinement into a luxury craft, disconnected from consequence. The sting is “the very worst training,” a deliberately counterintuitive reversal of the usual humanist assumption that better inner life automatically makes better citizens.

The subtext is Grierson’s lifelong suspicion of art that treats society as scenery. As a founding force behind the British documentary movement, he argued that film shouldn’t just express individual temperament; it should organize public attention. This sentence carries the mood of the interwar and early welfare-state period: mass industry, mass politics, mass media. In that world, the unit of power isn’t the singular self but institutions - unions, corporations, state agencies, cooperatives - and the skills that matter are coordination, negotiation, collective imagination.

He also smuggles in a critique of bourgeois individualism. “Sensibility” here isn’t radical feeling; it’s tasteful feeling, the kind that can be perfected without ever colliding with labor, class, or policy. By pairing “corporate” with “cooperative,” he refuses a simple left-right moral: collectivization is coming either way. The question is whether you’ll be shaped by it, or help shape it.