Daily Inspiration Quote by Alan Bennett

The joke lands because it weaponizes a contradiction that every utopian project tries to hide: even anti-authority dreams come with a clipboard. Bennett compresses an entire political tragedy into one dry sentence, letting the punchline do the philosophizing. “Small anarchist community” sounds quaint, almost pastoral, until “rules” strolls in and gives away the game. Anarchism here isn’t treated as a serious blueprint so much as a human wish: the desire to live without being pushed around, paired with the equally human urge to push things into order.

The specific intent is classic Bennett: puncture grand ideals with the stubborn comedy of social reality. The line doesn’t sneer at freedom so much as at the managerial instinct that attaches itself to any collective, even one founded on rejecting management. “People wouldn’t obey” flips the usual complaint on its head. In most communities, obedience is demanded by force or tradition; in this one, obedience is the one thing you can’t justify without betraying the premise. The “we” is telling, too: Bennett isn’t mocking some abstract anarchist Other. He implicates the organizers, the well-meaning planners who want liberation to run on a timetable.

Contextually, Bennett’s Britain is steeped in institutions - class, committees, procedures - and his work often finds pathos and humor in the gap between official language and lived behavior. The line reads like a postmortem of 20th-century idealism: not “anarchy failed,” but “humans brought their habits with them,” including the habit of making rules and calling it freedom.