Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line lands like a dry slap: if censorship is the state’s attempt to manage what can be said, assassination is simply the bluntest edit. It’s funny in the way Shaw is often funny - not because it’s light, but because it’s surgically over-literal. He collapses a genteel word (“censorship,” with its committees and blue pencils) into a body on the ground. The joke is the precision. The cruelty is the point.

The intent isn’t to equate a banned play with murder so much as to expose the shared logic underneath both: speech is treated as a threat, and power responds by removing the speaker. Shaw, a dramatist who made a career out of irritating respectable society, understands censorship as a spectrum. At one end: moral guardians and bureaucrats trying to prevent contamination. At the other: political violence that stops argument permanently. The sentence forces you to see continuity where polite discourse prefers separation.

Subtextually, it’s also a warning to liberals who think censorship is merely a cultural squabble. Once you accept the premise that certain ideas must be suppressed “for safety,” the only remaining question is intensity. Assassination is censorship without the pretense of civility.

Context matters: Shaw wrote in an era when anarchists, nationalists, and emperors met bombs and bullets; when colonial politics and European upheaval made “dangerous speech” a convenient scapegoat. As theater, the line is masterful: it stages the hidden endpoint of repression and makes the audience complicit in recognizing it.