"A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage"
About this Quote
Shaw turns a conventional compliment into a barb, teasing out the quiet tyranny hidden in words like "common sense" and "good taste". These virtues sound innocuous, even admirable, but he suggests they often serve as badges of conformity. What passes for common sense can be a bundle of received ideas that spare us the trouble of thinking, while good taste frequently polices expression so that nothing raw, disruptive, or truly new can take hold. To praise someone as sensible and tasteful, then, may be to say they will never risk offense or challenge a cherished falsehood.
The remark grows from Shaw’s lifelong campaign against Victorian and Edwardian respectability. As a dramatist, critic, and Fabian socialist, he delighted in puncturing the complacencies of the middle class. Plays like Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Pygmalion expose how propriety and manners mask exploitation and arbitrary hierarchies. The censors who banned him did so in the name of good taste. His characters often collide with what the crowd calls common sense, only to reveal that public wisdom is too often a defense of the status quo. In Saint Joan, he dramatizes how institutions, urgently defending orthodoxy, crush an individual whose moral courage refuses to submit.
Originality, for Shaw, is not a decorative flourish but the willingness to think past received opinion; moral courage is the resolve to state and act on those thoughts despite ridicule or penalty. Both qualities will look like bad taste and folly to those who cherish conventional comfort. The aphorism thus flips the familiar hierarchy: the socially safe virtues are downgraded, and the risky, disreputable ones are elevated.
The sting endures because societies still confuse politeness with goodness and equate consensus with truth. Shaw prods us to ask whether our praise of prudence masks a fear of candor, and whether our reverence for taste has become a quiet refusal to face what most needs saying.
The remark grows from Shaw’s lifelong campaign against Victorian and Edwardian respectability. As a dramatist, critic, and Fabian socialist, he delighted in puncturing the complacencies of the middle class. Plays like Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Pygmalion expose how propriety and manners mask exploitation and arbitrary hierarchies. The censors who banned him did so in the name of good taste. His characters often collide with what the crowd calls common sense, only to reveal that public wisdom is too often a defense of the status quo. In Saint Joan, he dramatizes how institutions, urgently defending orthodoxy, crush an individual whose moral courage refuses to submit.
Originality, for Shaw, is not a decorative flourish but the willingness to think past received opinion; moral courage is the resolve to state and act on those thoughts despite ridicule or penalty. Both qualities will look like bad taste and folly to those who cherish conventional comfort. The aphorism thus flips the familiar hierarchy: the socially safe virtues are downgraded, and the risky, disreputable ones are elevated.
The sting endures because societies still confuse politeness with goodness and equate consensus with truth. Shaw prods us to ask whether our praise of prudence masks a fear of candor, and whether our reverence for taste has become a quiet refusal to face what most needs saying.
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| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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