Daily Inspiration Quote by Kathy Acker

Acker’s line is a small act of refusal: a refusal to let “people are horrible” stand as the convenient, sophisticated diagnosis. Coming from a writer who built her work out of confrontation - with patriarchy, literary gatekeeping, and the polite lies of culture - the sentence lands less as naïve humanism than as a deliberately chosen downgrade of blame. “Horrible” implies essence, a fixed moral rot. “They just don’t know” turns cruelty into a symptom of ignorance, insulation, and inherited scripts.

The opening clause matters. “Traveling around” isn’t postcard tourism; it’s exposure therapy. Acker’s career was shaped by movement through scenes and cities, by watching how institutions and subcultures train people to desire, fear, and punish. The phrase suggests she’s collecting evidence against her own cynicism. She’s seen enough to distrust purity politics, but also enough to distrust the easy thrill of contempt.

The subtext is political. Ignorance isn’t individual stupidity; it’s produced. People “don’t know” because they’re not allowed to know: because class, gender norms, nationalism, and media narrow the field of empathy and imagination. That framing quietly shifts the question from “Who deserves disgust?” to “What structures keep everyone miseducated?”

There’s also a tough kind of tenderness here. Acker doesn’t absolve harm; she reframes its origin so change remains thinkable. If the problem is knowledge - what’s been hidden, erased, or unlearned - then the radical task is less moral purification than exposure, contact, and the unsettling education that travel, art, and dissent can force.