Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw slides the knife in with a smile: the line pretends to be a casual, almost commonsense observation, but it’s really an indictment of the marriage market and the low moral bar set for men. The wit depends on inversion. Instead of blaming women for “choosiness,” he suggests the opposite: women are forced into compromise because the available supply of “character” is so poor, and because social structures make opting out costly. It’s a joke that lands by making marriage sound less like romantic destiny and more like pragmatic surrender.

The subtext is pure Shaw: skepticism toward Victorian respectability and the way institutions launder hypocrisy. “Character” here isn’t vague virtue-signaling; it’s the hard stuff - integrity, sexual ethics, responsibility - the qualities polite society applauded in speeches while excusing their absence in men’s private lives. The punchline implies that women’s standards are not the problem; the world is.

Context matters. Shaw wrote in an era when marriage was one of the few socially sanctioned routes to security for many women, with limited legal and economic independence and a culture that treated spinsterhood as failure. Under those constraints, “being particular” becomes a luxury. The line reads like misogyny if you stop at the surface, but Shaw’s signature move is to ventriloquize a brutal truth in order to make the listener uneasy: if marriage requires women to accept compromised men, what does that say about the men - and about a society that calls the arrangement moral?