Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw takes the Golden Rule, pats it on the head, and then steals its wallet. The original moral advice assumes a neat symmetry: what feels kind to you will feel kind to someone else. Shaw, a dramatist trained to watch people misread each other in real time, punctures that assumption with a line that sounds like etiquette but lands like social critique. “Do unto others” becomes not generosity but projection; “as you expect” exposes the ego hiding inside so-called morality.

The bite is in “Their tastes may not be the same.” Taste here isn’t just preference about food or art; it’s shorthand for class, culture, temperament, desire. Shaw’s Edwardian world was full of reformers and do-gooders convinced that salvation looked like their own habits. His warning reads as a preemptive strike against paternalism: the charitable act that’s really a performance of superiority, the advice that’s really a demand to be mirrored back.

As a playwright, Shaw also knows how cruelty can travel disguised as virtue. Giving people what you would want can become a socially acceptable way to ignore who they are. The line advocates a harder ethic than the Golden Rule: imaginative empathy. Not “How would I feel?” but “How does this person feel, given their own inner weather?” It’s comedy sharpened into instruction - a reminder that decency requires curiosity, not just good intentions.