Success Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line is a neatly cocky shove at the respectable people in the room. It sets up a fake innocence - “some look… and ask why” - then pivots into a dare: the problem with most “realism” is that it mistakes resignation for wisdom. The first clause caricatures the dominant Victorian habit of treating the world as a closed system: institutions, class arrangements, and “common sense” as fixed furniture. “Why” in that register isn’t curiosity; it’s often a request for justification that ends in acquiescence.

Then Shaw flips the burden of proof. “I dream of things that never were” doesn’t romanticize fantasy so much as reclaim imagination as a political instrument. In Shaw’s hands, dreaming is not escapism but a method: treat the present as provisional, not natural. “Why not?” is the punchline and the provocation. It’s a short, almost childlike question that exposes how much of adulthood is just socially enforced caution. The wit lies in making radical change sound like the simplest option and leaving the defenders of the status quo to explain themselves.

Context matters: Shaw was a playwright and a Fabian socialist, writing against complacent liberal reform and inherited hierarchy, using stagecraft to smuggle arguments into entertainment. The quote’s aphoristic symmetry (why/why not, are/never were) gives it the snap of a slogan, but the subtext is sharper: progress requires not just critique of what exists, but the audacity to treat “impossible” as merely “untried.”