Daily Inspiration Quote by Malcolm Bradbury

Bradbury’s line is a neat little grenade: it flatters itself as folksy common sense while mocking the liberal impulse to psychologize everything into a solvable social problem. The joke turns on a deliberately ridiculous category error. A goat isn’t a sheep with a sad backstory. It’s a different animal entirely. By pretending liberals would explain biological difference as mere trauma, Bradbury skewers a certain progressive reflex: if we can name the wound, we can rewrite the person.

The real target isn’t goats; it’s the liberal worldview as caricatured by late-20th-century British culture wars, where class, education, and policy debates got translated into competing styles of explanation. Conservatives (in the stereotype) reach for taxonomy and tradition: things are what they are. Liberals reach for environment and remediation: things are what they’ve been made into. Bradbury compresses that clash into a barnyard quip that sounds like pub banter but carries intellectual bite.

“Broken homes” is doing extra work here. It’s a phrase that once carried moral panic about divorce and social decline, often weaponized against reformers as soft on “personal responsibility.” Bradbury’s barb suggests liberal compassion becomes a kind of denial: difference, deviance, stubbornness - all rebranded as damage. The punchline lands because it’s unfair in a familiar way: it lampoons empathy as naivete, then wins laughs by acting like it’s merely describing reality. That’s the satire: the joke exposes a caricature, while also revealing how seductive caricature is.