Time & Perspective Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line lands like a compliment and a slap in the same sentence. On the surface, it flatters the “veteran journalist” as a creature of pure professional reflex: quick, decisive, always ready with copy. Underneath, it’s an acid little diagnosis of a trade built on speed, deadlines, and the performance of certainty. “Never had time” isn’t just about newsroom pressure; it’s Shaw’s insinuation that the profession trains you out of second thoughts, and then pretends that lack of revision is a virtue.

The wit hinges on a sly reversal. We tend to treat experience as the thing that deepens judgment. Shaw suggests experience can also narrow it, hardening habit into instinct. Thinking twice becomes a luxury, even a kind of moral indulgence, when the system rewards first drafts and hot takes. That’s where the jab gets sharper: journalism, in Shaw’s framing, risks confusing immediacy with accuracy, fluency with truth.

Context matters. Shaw wasn’t a neutral observer; he was a polemicist and showman who understood media as an arena where reputations are made and meanings are simplified. Living through the churn of late-Victorian papers and the early mass press, he watched how public opinion could be whipped into coherence by repetition, not reflection. His dramatist’s ear catches the tempo of the newsroom: the sentence itself moves fast, offering no pause for the very “thinking twice” it mourns. The subtext: a culture that can’t slow down will eventually mistake urgency for insight.