"We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Goodnight."
'An Inspector Calls' is one of Priestley's best-known works for the stage and is considered to be one of the classics of mid-20th-century English theatre. It is frequently set as a GCSE text in schools.
This speech is from Act Three of JB Priestley’s play ‘An Inspector Calls’. The Inspector is addressing the family before he leaves their house. It relates to Marxist critique of capitalist labour practices, which argues that owners of capital are inherently unwilling to consider the plight of those who work for them. In the Inspector’s view, humans quite simply have an obligation to one another because it is right in the abstract to care for other people, and, more urgently, because a world that ignores the connections between people is not a stable world at all.
