Life & Wisdom Quote by J.B. Priestley

Priestley skewers a peculiarly modern craving: we want genius the way we want public art or national parks, as a civic amenity. The opening line is all appetite and spectacle - “towering geniuses” who will “reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire” - a deliberately inflated wish-list of artists as cultural saviors. Then he punctures it with that cool, bureaucratic “but of course,” the phrase that always signals surrender to convention. The joke lands because it’s painfully recognizable: institutions celebrate creativity only after it’s been domesticated.

The subtext is a warning about a society that talks about imagination while engineering it out of existence. Priestley frames the real power struggle as not between talent and mediocrity, but between inspiration and administration. “Pattern of our society” is doing quiet work: it implies an invisible grid of norms, class expectations, career tracks, committee approvals. Even the geniuses, in this fantasy, must “fit” - as if their value is contingent on compliance. “Sound administrative types” is Priestley’s deadliest irony: “sound” connotes prudence and reliability, the virtues of management, yet here they’re the gatekeepers of “colour and fire,” the very things management fears.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of industrial modernity and the mid-century expansion of bureaucratic life, Priestley understood how easily art becomes a department, a funding line, a brand asset. The line isn’t anti-organization; it’s anti-confusion. A culture that demands genius on command ends up with something safer: creativity that can take orders, and therefore stops being revelation.