Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw doesn’t praise marriage here; he anatomizes it with a playwright’s grin. The line snaps because it flips the sentimental script: marriage isn’t sold as an antidote to temptation but as its most efficient delivery system. “Maximum” does the heavy lifting, turning romance into a kind of social engineering problem. The joke lands in the math of it: society wants to tame desire, yet it builds a legal, daily, intimate arrangement that keeps desire constantly in reach.

The subtext is pure Shaw: the Victorian (and Edwardian) habit of moralizing sex while obsessing over it. Marriage, in this framing, isn’t primarily about love or companionship; it’s a sanctioned arena where the very thing you’re supposed to resist becomes permanently available. Temptation doesn’t disappear under vows; it’s given a schedule, a shared address, and a respectable name. Opportunity, too, isn’t just sexual; it’s economic and social. Marriage grants access to status, security, legitimacy, and the performance of virtue, all while allowing private appetites to keep breathing.

Context matters: Shaw wrote in a Britain where divorce was stigmatized, women’s options were narrowed by law and custom, and sexual hypocrisy was practically a civic religion. As a dramatist and social critic, he liked institutions best when they revealed their contradictions under stage lights. This line works because it treats marriage not as a sacred mystery but as a brilliantly conflicted bargain: a culture’s attempt to domesticate desire by moving it indoors, where it can be supervised, celebrated, and quietly exploited.