Life & Mortality Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw laces this line with the kind of civilized cruelty he loved to put onstage: a sentence that sounds like doctrine, then detonates into diagnosis. "The heretic is always better dead" isn’t an endorsement so much as an x-ray of institutional logic. If a system claims moral certainty, dissent can’t be allowed to remain visible; it has to be made exemplary. Death becomes the cleanest argument because it eliminates the ongoing embarrassment of complexity.

Then Shaw twists the knife: "mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic". The subtext is less theological than political. The categories that authorize punishment are unstable, and everyone knows it. In real life, sainthood and heresy often share the same raw materials: stubbornness, charisma, a refusal to flatter power. The only difference is who gets written up as a threat and who gets canonized after the fact. Shaw is pointing at the courtroom trick at the heart of moral persecution: we pretend we can read souls, then build legal and social machinery around that pretense.

Context matters. Shaw wrote in a Britain still shadowed by religious orthodoxies, Victorian respectability, and the state’s confidence in managing belief, sex, class, and speech. As a socialist and contrarian, he understood how "heresy" migrates: from creed to politics to culture, wherever authority needs a word for the unmanageable. The line works because it collapses the distance between piety and violence, forcing us to see that certainty is often just brutality with better stationery.