Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw lands the knife where it actually hurts: not in public exposure, but in private corrosion. The line flips the sentimental idea that lying is mainly a social offense (you lose trust, you get shunned) into a psychological one. The liar’s real sentence is epistemic exile. You can still charm a room, still spin a story, still “get away with it.” But you’ve quietly forfeited the basic comfort of taking another person at their word. The world becomes a stage full of actors, because you’ve made yourself one.

That’s classic Shaw: moral analysis delivered with the brisk efficiency of a punchline. The phrasing “not in the least” dismisses the obvious consequence as almost childish, then pivots to the darker cost. It’s not that people refuse you; it’s that you’ve trained yourself to read every promise as strategy, every kindness as leverage. Lying, in this view, isn’t just a tactic but a worldview you can’t turn off. You start projecting your own manipulations outward, and suspicion becomes your default form of intimacy.

As a dramatist shaped by Victorian respectability and its hypocrisies, Shaw is attuned to the gap between public virtue and private motive. His plays keep insisting that society runs on performance, polite fictions, and negotiated truths. This line weaponizes that insight: if you insist on living by performance, you don’t merely risk being unmasked; you lose access to sincerity altogether. The subtext is almost punitive economics: every lie you tell buys a short-term advantage by spending down your long-term ability to trust. The liar ends up rich in control, bankrupt in belief.