Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line is less a gentle defense of dissent than a theatrical slap at complacency. “Sometimes” is doing sly work: he grants the minority no halo, only the possibility of clarity. Then he turns the knife with “always wrong,” a categorical insult aimed at crowds, committees, and the cozy morality of consensus. The humor is in the imbalance. Shaw sounds like he’s offering a measured aphorism, then detonates it with absolutism, the kind of provocation that forces you to argue back - which is precisely his point. If you feel compelled to say, “That can’t be true,” you’ve already stepped out of the majority trance and into critical attention.

The subtext is anti-herd, not anti-democratic in a literal policy sense but deeply suspicious of what democracy can become when it mistakes counting for thinking. Majorities, in Shaw’s view, are rarely the result of independent judgment; they’re manufactured by fashion, fear, habit, and the lazy relief of belonging. His plays repeatedly stage this mechanism: respectable opinion as a kind of social anesthesia, with one inconvenient character insisting on reality.

Context matters. Shaw wrote in an age of mass politics, imperial self-certainty, and booming newspapers - a modern machine for producing “common sense.” His socialism and contrarian temperament sharpened his contempt for received wisdom. The line’s intent isn’t to crown outsiders as saints; it’s to warn that consensus is often just conformity with better branding.