Time & Perspective Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw slips a cosmic shrug into a neatly barbed sentence. "Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough" sounds like comfort until you notice how mercilessly it levels the playing field. The line drains experience of its status as personal destiny and recasts it as mere scheduling: given enough time, your calamities and your triumphs stop looking like moral verdicts and start looking like statistical inevitabilities.

The wit is in the fake generosity of "everybody". It promises solidarity, but the subtext is almost nihilistic: uniqueness is an illusion produced by short timelines. Stretch the horizon and all the dramatic distinctions we cling to - lucky/unlucky, exceptional/ordinary, punished/rewarded - collapse into the same pile of events, redistributed by time. Shaw, a dramatist obsessed with social hypocrisy and the machinery of institutions, is also taking a swipe at the Victorian faith that character guarantees outcomes. If "everything" comes for you eventually, then merit is not a shield and vice is not a sentence; history doesn't hand out neat lessons, it just keeps rolling.

Context matters: Shaw lived through industrial modernity, empire, war, and ideological upheaval. He watched "unthinkable" events become ordinary. The phrase "if there is time enough" is the quiet knife. It admits the only real exemption is mortality. Time isn't a healer here; it's the great equalizer, and death is the only loophole.