"An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable"
About this Quote
Shaw skewers a national self-image with one deft swap: morality for mere discomfort. The line works because it doesn’t accuse the Englishman of being amoral; it accuses him of mistaking the body’s flinch for the soul’s compass. It’s not that he can’t tell right from wrong. It’s that he flatters himself into believing that awkwardness, squeamishness, or social embarrassment is proof of virtue. The joke lands with Shaw’s favorite weapon: turning ethical seriousness into a symptom of class manners.
The subtext is social more than spiritual. “Uncomfortable” isn’t guilt after wrongdoing; it’s the queasy feeling that arrives when taboo is mentioned, when sex gets frank, when poverty stops being an abstraction, when someone breaches polite distance. In other words: the Englishman’s moral certainty is revealed as a defense of decorum. Respectability becomes a moral alibi.
Context matters because Shaw made a career of detonating Victorian and Edwardian pieties onstage. His plays needle the way “good society” confuses propriety with goodness and treats frank talk as indecent while tolerating cruelty with a straight face. The line also targets a broader imperial confidence: a nation that preached moral mission abroad while nursing delicate sensibilities at home. Shaw’s intent isn’t just to insult; it’s to force a diagnostic question. When we call something “immoral,” are we responding to harm - or to the sensation of being jarred, exposed, or made to look at what we’d rather keep off the table?
The subtext is social more than spiritual. “Uncomfortable” isn’t guilt after wrongdoing; it’s the queasy feeling that arrives when taboo is mentioned, when sex gets frank, when poverty stops being an abstraction, when someone breaches polite distance. In other words: the Englishman’s moral certainty is revealed as a defense of decorum. Respectability becomes a moral alibi.
Context matters because Shaw made a career of detonating Victorian and Edwardian pieties onstage. His plays needle the way “good society” confuses propriety with goodness and treats frank talk as indecent while tolerating cruelty with a straight face. The line also targets a broader imperial confidence: a nation that preached moral mission abroad while nursing delicate sensibilities at home. Shaw’s intent isn’t just to insult; it’s to force a diagnostic question. When we call something “immoral,” are we responding to harm - or to the sensation of being jarred, exposed, or made to look at what we’d rather keep off the table?
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | Attributed to George Bernard Shaw; listed on Wikiquote (George Bernard Shaw) as "An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable". |
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