Time & Perspective Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line pretends to be a sober lament about human stupidity, then quietly rigs the game so the verdict is unavoidable. He stacks two truisms - history’s repetition and life’s knack for surprise - into a trap: if both are true, then “Man” isn’t merely fallible; he’s structurally unequipped to learn. The bite is in that courtroom phrasing, “how incapable must Man be,” a rhetorical question that sounds like philosophy but behaves like satire. Shaw doesn’t argue; he convicts.

The subtext is less about events than about ego. We flatter ourselves with the narrative that experience educates, that suffering produces wisdom, that politics evolves. Shaw punctures that self-congratulation by pointing out the loop: we recognize patterns only after they’ve already run us over, then we’re shocked again when the next catastrophe arrives wearing a new hat. “The unexpected always happens” is the kicker - a dry joke about our perpetual confidence that this time, we’ve seen it all.

Context matters: Shaw wrote in an era that watched industrial capitalism, imperial politics, and mass propaganda promise progress while reliably reproducing old cruelties in modern costumes. As a dramatist and polemicist, he’s staging a moral farce where the audience (society) keeps applauding its own enlightenment between acts of repetition. The intent isn’t despair; it’s provocation. If humanity is “incapable,” maybe the problem isn’t memory but the incentives and myths that make forgetting feel like common sense.