Daily Inspiration Quote by Chester Brown

There’s a casual sting in Brown’s phrasing: “weird behaviour,” “didn’t know,” “needed an answer,” “made up one.” It’s the voice of someone poking at the aura of scientific inevitability, reminding you that diagnosis can begin less as discovery than as paperwork - a story that calms everyone down. Coming from a cartoonist, it reads like a panel-by-panel demolition of institutional confidence: first confusion, then pattern-spotting, then the comforting click of a label.

The intent isn’t anti-science so much as anti-myth. Brown is calling out the human need for categories, especially when faced with nonconforming bodies, desires, or minds. “Similarity” is doing heavy work here: it suggests that once authorities decide disparate cases belong together, the grouping starts to look like an underlying truth. The subtext is about power. If you can name a behavior, you can treat it, police it, reimburse it, file it, and teach it. “Made up” is a deliberately blunt accusation that diagnoses are, at least at birth, social inventions before they become medical realities.

The late-19th-century context matters: the rise of psychiatry, sexology, and the bureaucratic modern state. This is the era when people like Krafft-Ebing and later Freud tried to rationalize what Victorian culture found embarrassing or threatening. Brown’s line also echoes contemporary debates over how categories like “hysteria,” “homosexuality,” or even certain psychiatric disorders were stabilized: not purely by lab findings, but by cultural anxieties, moral norms, and institutional convenience. He’s not saying nothing is real; he’s saying the first draft of “real” often gets written by whoever needs order most.