Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line is a perfectly tailored pin: it punctures genteel society while pretending to merely describe it. “Perpendicular” and “horizontal” are geometry doing double duty - upright bodies performing respectability, horizontal bodies implying sex. The joke lands because it’s anatomically obvious and socially taboo at once. In one quick inversion, Shaw turns ballroom etiquette into a kind of polite camouflage, a sanctioned pageant that lets desire circulate without ever naming itself.

The specific intent is to demystify romance and to mock the institutions that launder it. Dancing, in Shaw’s framing, isn’t transcendent art; it’s choreography as courtship, libido translated into acceptable movement. The “expression” matters: desire doesn’t disappear under polite rules, it simply adopts a better costume. That’s classic Shaw - suspicious of sentiment, allergic to hypocrisy, happiest when a respectable ritual reveals its messy engine.

The subtext is harsher than the quip suggests. If the vertical posture is society’s preferred angle, it’s because the culture needs plausible deniability. You can touch, flirt, and signal availability under the bright lights of propriety, then walk away insisting nothing “improper” occurred. Shaw implies that morality often functions less as restraint than as theater: a way to keep appetite intact while keeping appearances cleaner.

Context sharpens the blade. Shaw wrote in an era of rigid Victorian/Edwardian decorum, where public sexuality was heavily policed and private behavior often wasn’t. As a dramatist obsessed with social masks, he spots in dance the perfect emblem: intimacy with a chaperone, desire with a rulebook, transgression with an alibi.