Time & Perspective Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw is skewering the mind’s talent for turning desire into evidence, and he does it with the clean brutality of a stage direction: “suddenly,” the arguments appear, and “become blind,” they vanish. The line isn’t about ignorance; it’s about motivated intelligence. The sharper you are, the more convincingly you can lawyer up for whatever you already want to be true. That’s the joke and the warning: reason isn’t always a neutral referee. It’s often hired counsel.

The sentence’s structure performs the cognitive trick it condemns. First comes the innocent-sounding “want to believe,” a phrase that frames belief as preference, almost consumer choice. Then the visual verbs take over: “see” and “blind.” Shaw implies that persuasion is less a logical conversion than a shift in what your attention will allow into the room. Once your identity or comfort is invested, counterarguments aren’t defeated; they’re rendered invisible.

Context matters. Shaw’s career as a dramatist and public polemicist (socialism, religion, morality, politics) put him in constant contact with audiences who could applaud radical ideas in the abstract and resist them in practice. His plays thrive on characters who argue brilliantly while dodging the truth about themselves. This line reads like a meta-note from the playwright: watch how people rationalize, how conviction can be a form of self-protection.

The intent is not to flatter skepticism but to indict certainty. Shaw’s cynicism lands because it refuses the comforting fiction that “having reasons” means “being reasonable.”