Science & Tech Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw lands the punchline with the offhand brutality of a man who’s watched “education” become a prestige costume. The line is engineered like a stage gag: a neat triad (philosophy, science, art) rising in seriousness, each wrecked by the same culprit - the “fool’s brain” that can’t metabolize ideas without turning them into their degraded forms. “Digest” is the key verb. Knowledge isn’t a halo; it’s food. If your system is weak, the meal doesn’t nourish, it curdles.

The subtext is less anti-intellectual than anti-institutional. Shaw isn’t arguing that philosophy is folly; he’s accusing universities of rewarding the sort of mind that confuses possession with understanding. “Pedantry” is the tell: art, in his view, is the most vulnerable to being killed by credentials, cataloguing, and correct terminology - the museum label replacing the painting. And “science into superstition” skewers the way scientific authority can be wielded as dogma, a new priesthood of “experts” whose jargon functions like incantation.

Then the twist: “Hence University education.” Shaw’s cynicism is surgical; he implies the university doesn’t cure foolishness, it systematizes it, giving folly a syllabus and a gown. Context matters: Shaw came up outside traditional elite pipelines, skeptical of British class machinery and the moral alibis of respectable institutions. As a dramatist, he also knew that the cleverest systems often produce the most elegantly defended nonsense - and that a credential can be a very convincing prop.