Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Sheridan skewers the crowd with a line that sounds polite but lands like a slap. “The fatigue” is the tell: independent judgment isn’t framed as noble or enlightened, but as work - draining, unglamorous, and therefore routinely avoided. He’s not lamenting a lack of intelligence so much as diagnosing a preference. Most people outsource thinking the way they outsource errands: to friends, to fashion, to authority, to whatever comes pre-packaged with social approval.

As a playwright steeped in the manners-and-masks culture of late 18th-century Britain, Sheridan understood that public opinion often behaves like a stage direction. In his world, reputations are written by rumor, politics runs on performance, and moral certainty is frequently just good acting. The quote’s sting comes from its quiet inversion of Enlightenment optimism. The era loved to flatter “reason,” yet Sheridan notes how rarely reason is exercised when it costs effort or risks embarrassment. Judging for yourself can mean dissenting from your class, your party, your table; it’s not merely cognitive labor, it’s social jeopardy.

The subtext is pragmatic, even cynical: if you want to sway people, don’t expect them to wrestle with arguments. Give them cues, narratives, incentives, a respectable consensus. Sheridan isn’t excusing passivity; he’s warning that the default setting of a society is mimicry. The few who do the tiring work of judgment become outliers - and, not incidentally, threats to any system that depends on agreeable compliance.