Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Silence, in Shaw's hands, isn't saintly restraint; it's strategy. "Choose silence of all virtues" is a provocation dressed up as advice, the kind of line that flatters moral ambition while quietly undercutting it. Shaw, the dramatist who made careers out of exposing hypocrisy in drawing rooms and parliaments, treats virtue as a tool of social leverage. The sentence pivots on a sly bargain: keep your mouth shut and you gain two advantages at once - you collect evidence against others ("hear other men's imperfections") and you withhold evidence against yourself ("conceal your own").

The subtext is sharply unsentimental about how reputations are made. Speech is self-incrimination; talk supplies the world with your tells, your contradictions, your vanity. Silence, by contrast, turns you into an observer, even a judge. It also makes other people do the work: in the discomfort of your quiet, they fill the space with their own disclosures, their little cruelties, their careless boasts. Shaw is pointing to an asymmetry of power in conversation: the less you reveal, the more you can read.

Context matters. Shaw wrote in a culture obsessed with propriety, where public virtue often meant private maneuvering, and where the theatre - his theatre especially - thrived on the gap between what characters say and what they are. The line works because it refuses to romanticize moral life; it treats "virtue" as performance management. In typical Shavian fashion, the sting is that the advice is probably correct, and still faintly disgusting.