Time & Perspective Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw turns mental “vacancy” into a public health hazard. The line is funny because it treats opinions like opportunistic bacteria: invisible, ubiquitous, and eager to colonize the first unguarded surface. That comic exaggeration is doing serious work. Shaw isn’t merely recommending confidence; he’s warning that the modern mind is porous, and the default condition of a porous mind is occupation.

The specific intent is defensive: keep your inner life actively staffed. “Smallest corner” suggests that conformity doesn’t need a grand surrender. It starts with a momentary lapse - a pause in judgment, a desire to be liked, a tired day when you outsource thinking. “Rush in from all quarters” frames society as a stampede. Opinions aren’t presented as carefully argued positions but as ambient pressure, arriving fast, loud, and in crowds.

Subtext: the threat isn’t just bad ideas; it’s borrowed living. Shaw, the dramatist and professional provocateur, built a career on puncturing polite consensus. This sentence flatters the contrarian, but it also admits how hard contrarianism is. You don’t resist “other people’s opinions” once; you resist them continually, because the social world doesn’t stop talking when you stop paying attention.

Contextually, Shaw’s era was thick with mass persuasion: expanding newspapers, party politics, patriotic slogans, moral campaigns - the machinery of public opinion coming online at scale. His jab anticipates today’s feeds and hot takes, but it’s rooted in a pre-digital anxiety: that the crowd’s voice, once amplified, makes private thought feel like an empty room begging to be filled.