Daily Inspiration Quote by George Steiner

Steiner’s sentence lands like a sober hand on the volume knob, less a complaint about loud rooms than an indictment of a whole civilization’s coping mechanism. “Inebriated” is the needle: he’s not describing occasional distraction but a culture that seeks noise the way an addict seeks a fix. Sound becomes a drug that keeps us from noticing what silence would reveal: doubt, grief, moral ambiguity, the unfinished business of thought.

The pairing of “noise” and “gregariousness” is slyly prosecutorial. Noise is easy to blame; gregariousness sounds like a virtue. Steiner yokes them together to suggest that even our sociability can become anesthetic, a constant performance of togetherness that crowds out solitude, reading, prayer, and the slow disciplines that make interior life possible. The subtext isn’t anti-people; it’s anti-evasion. A society that can’t bear quiet may be one that can’t bear accountability.

Context matters: Steiner wrote across the long shadow of the Holocaust and the disillusionments of European high culture, which taught him that refinement and catastrophe can coexist. He was also a critic of modernity’s attention economy before we had that phrase: mass media, ceaseless entertainment, the talk-show churn of opinion in place of judgment. In that light, “terribly wrong” is calibrated severity. He’s not scolding manners; he’s diagnosing a spiritual and intellectual emergency: when stimulation becomes the default, thought becomes the exception, and culture mistakes constant connection for genuine communion.