Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line lands like a drawing-room slap: marriage, that Victorian idol of respectability, is recast as a practical arrangement suited to people who can still wriggle out of it. The insult is aimed upward as much as downward. “Good enough for the lower classes” isn’t just snobbery for flavor; it’s bait. Shaw is mocking the genteel fantasy that the upper classes model moral order, when in fact they’re trapped by property, reputation, and the legal machinery built to protect inheritance.

The wicked twist is “facilities for desertion.” For working people, desertion can be literal: a man walks out, changes towns, starts over. It’s brutal, but possible. For the wealthy, desertion is complicated by assets, social surveillance, and a public identity that can’t easily be shed. Shaw’s subtext is that privilege doesn’t merely confer options; it also manufactures captivity. The upper classes aren’t nobler, just more entangled.

Context matters: Shaw is writing in an era when divorce was expensive, scandalous, and structurally biased, and when marriage functioned as a social contract binding families, capital, and lineage. As a dramatist and socialist-leaning provocateur, he uses the paradox to expose how “morality” often tracks with class convenience. The joke works because it reverses the usual moral hierarchy: the poor are granted a rough freedom, the rich denied it by the very institutions they champion. It’s cynicism with a purpose, a reminder that the most polished cages are still cages.