Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line works because it commits a social blasphemy with perfect grammatical poise: it flips the moral furniture without raising its voice. A burglar and a financier are supposed to belong to different moral species one is criminal, the other respectable. Shaw collapses that distinction by treating “faults” and “qualities” as interchangeable labels, dependent not on behavior but on who gets licensed to do it.

The intent is less to defend burglary than to indict the way capitalism canonizes certain appetites once they wear a suit. The burglar’s daring, opportunism, cool risk assessment, and willingness to take what isn’t “his” become virtues when routed through institutions: the bank, the firm, the contract. Shaw’s subtext is that legality is not a synonym for ethics; it’s a social technology that blesses some forms of extraction and punishes others. If theft is condemned in the alley but celebrated in the market, the real issue isn’t theft it’s status.

Context matters: Shaw wrote in an era of industrial wealth, stark class divides, and a growing sense that “respectability” was often just successful predation with paperwork. As a dramatist and Fabian-leaning critic, he specialized in exposing how polite society maintains its innocence through euphemism: “investment,” “speculation,” “foreclosure” as ways of not saying “I took.” The elegance of the aphorism is its cynicism: it doesn’t argue; it rebrands. Once you see the burglar inside the financier, you can’t unsee how much of moral judgment is just an accounting decision.