Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

“An index is a great leveller” lands like a Shavian dagger: small, elegant, and aimed at vanity. Shaw is talking about that humble back-of-the-book apparatus that drags lofty ideas down into alphabetical submission. In a culture that prizes grand systems and self-important authorship, the index is a quietly radical technology. It turns a work from a performance into a tool. It allows the reader to raid the text, to skip the author’s preferred itinerary, to locate the one claim, name, or scandalous aside that matters to them. That’s the “levelling”: hierarchy collapses when the reader can bypass rhetoric and go straight to receipts.

The line also jabs at class and cultural gatekeeping. In Shaw’s world of experts, critics, and “serious” men with serious books, the index democratizes access. You don’t need to have read the canon properly, in order, with the right reverence; you can enter through any door. Alphabetical order is brutally indifferent to reputation. Plato and plumbing sit inches apart. A duke can be found as quickly as a drudge.

Underneath the wit is Shaw’s lifelong suspicion of mystique. He distrusted institutions that maintained power through obscurity, whether in politics, religion, or art. The index, by contrast, is accountability in miniature: it assumes the text can be searched, checked, cross-examined. It’s the bureaucratic cousin of satire itself - a mechanism that exposes, organizes, and, by doing so, refuses to be impressed.