Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line lands like a shrug with a knife in it: the modern faith in science as tidy progress is, to him, a comforting fairy tale. “Never” is doing a lot of work. It’s not a measured claim about research outcomes; it’s a dramatist’s absolutism, designed to puncture the Victorian-Edwardian confidence that every new discovery is a moral upgrade. Shaw treats “problem” as a stage prop. You think you’re watching one plot resolve; the curtain falls and suddenly there are ten new acts.

The subtext is less anti-science than anti-complacency. Shaw’s real target is the public appetite for solutions without consequences, the political temptation to outsource judgment to “experts,” and the bourgeois habit of calling any new capability “improvement.” The joke is that science is both miracle-worker and mischief-maker, and society wants only the miracle. The “ten more” isn’t arithmetic; it’s a ratio of unintended effects: antibiotics give you resistant bacteria, industrialization gives you pollution, faster communication gives you faster misinformation. Progress is a Hydra.

Context matters: Shaw wrote in an era intoxicated by engineering, medicine, and imperial logistics, when “scientific” was becoming a synonym for “inevitable.” As a playwright, he’s also defending conflict itself. Drama requires complications; so does history. The line works because it turns a triumphalist narrative into a punchline, insisting that knowledge expands the perimeter of what can go wrong. Science, in Shaw’s telling, doesn’t end arguments. It multiplies them.