Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line lands like a neat little arson kit: if truth is going to matter, it will probably arrive dressed as offense. The genius is the word “blasphemies,” which doesn’t just mean “controversial ideas” but a direct violation of the sacred order - church doctrine, political pieties, the unspoken rules that keep a society feeling morally coherent. Shaw, a dramatist with a talent for making polite audiences squirm, is reminding you that “common sense” often functions as theology: a set of beliefs protected not by evidence but by outrage.

The intent is both a defense and a provocation. It defends heretics - scientific, moral, artistic - by framing their unpopularity as a predictable phase in the life cycle of new ideas. But it also needles the audience: if you’re never scandalized, you might be living inside someone else’s dogma. Shaw’s subtext is less “rebel for rebellion’s sake” than “watch who gets to define the sacred.” Power names blasphemy; history later renames it insight.

Context matters: Shaw wrote in an era when Darwinian evolution, socialism, women’s emancipation, and critiques of organized religion were destabilizing Victorian certainties. He was a Fabian socialist, a critic of capitalist morality, and a playwright who used comedy as a crowbar. The line is engineered to sound like a paradox but operate like a diagnostic: when a culture treats an idea as sacrilege, it may be protecting truth’s rival - comfort.