Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

A tidy little compliment disguised as a sneer, Shaw’s line flatters baseball by insulting cricket, then undercuts both by treating sport as an endurance test the viewer must survive. The “great advantage” isn’t strategy, artistry, or tradition; it’s that baseball is “sooner ended.” Shaw’s joke lands because it dodges the pieties that usually surround national games and instead judges them by a modern, unromantic metric: time.

The subtext is pure Shaw: impatience with inherited rituals and the smugness that clings to them. Cricket, especially in Shaw’s Britain, carried the perfume of empire and gentlemanly self-mythology, a game that could stretch across days as if leisure were a moral virtue. Baseball, by contrast, reads as brash and pragmatic, an American invention with a built-in respect for the clock (even if anyone who has sat through extra innings might object). Shaw isn’t really taking America’s side; he’s puncturing the idea that length equals depth, that a pastime becomes “noble” by being inconvenient.

Context matters: Shaw wrote as a dramatist obsessed with pace, structure, and the economy of attention. A play that overstays its welcome is a failure of craft; he applies the same aesthetic to sport. The line also catches a broader cultural pivot: early-20th-century modernity tugging against Victorian sprawl. Beneath the wit is a serious editorial claim about culture itself: traditions don’t deserve reverence just because they take longer. If anything, the ability to end is what keeps a ritual from becoming a hostage situation.