Parenting & Family Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line is a polite grenade lobbed into the parlor of Victorian moral instruction. On its face, it sounds like a worried adult trying to protect children from cynicism. Underneath, it’s Shaw’s favorite move: exposing “common sense” as a comfortable lie told by people who benefit from the current arrangement.

The target isn’t honesty; it’s the smug certainty of the slogan “honesty is the best policy,” a phrase that treats ethics like a market strategy. Shaw, a dramatist steeped in social critique and Fabian politics, hears the hypocrisy baked into that maxim: we preach integrity to the powerless while rewarding pliability, deference, and well-timed silence. If honesty were truly “best,” it wouldn’t need to be sold as policy. It would be structurally supported - in wages, in courts, in journalism, in business, in the small daily transactions where truth-telling can cost you rent money.

The sentence’s engine is its reversal of responsibility. Adults love to frame children as the moral test case: what values are we passing on? Shaw flips it: the moral burden belongs to the world, not the child. Until institutions stop punishing candor and paying dividends on deceit, telling kids that honesty “pays” isn’t virtue; it’s misrepresentation.

Context matters: Shaw wrote in an era of rigid respectability and widening inequality, when polite society maintained its self-image through euphemism and enforced ignorance. The quote works because it refuses the comforting fantasy that morality is mainly personal. It insists that ethics is also infrastructure.