Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line lands like a provocation dressed up as a proverb: “dangerous” not because old men are physically threatening, but because they’re liberated from the usual social hostage situation of consequence. If you don’t have to live with the fallout, you can afford to be reckless, ideological, even cruel. The knife twist is that Shaw frames this as emotional indifference to “the world,” widening the charge from personal selfishness to civilizational negligence.

The intent is less gerontophobia than a critique of power that outlives accountability. Shaw spent his career puncturing Victorian pieties and the complacency of ruling classes; here he distills a political psychology. The elderly, in his schema, can become the purest expression of unearned authority: still holding the levers, no longer constrained by the future those levers shape. That’s why the sentence works rhetorically: it replaces the sentimental cliché of wise elders with a colder hypothesis about incentive structures.

Subtext: the “old men” are a stand-in for institutions run on inertia - parliaments, empires, boards, churches - led by people insulated from the consequences of policy. Coming from a dramatist, it’s also stagecraft: a single line that instantly sketches a character type, the dignified patriarch revealed as a nihilist with good manners.

Context matters. Shaw lived through industrial upheaval, class conflict, and the approach of mass war. In that century’s brutal accounting, leaders could gamble with millions of lives while imagining history as someone else’s problem. The line is a warning about who gets to decide the future when they won’t be around to inhabit it.