Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

A Shaw line that lands like a compliment until you feel the blade. He draws a surgical distinction between speech and conversation: one is output, the other is exchange. “Power of speech” suggests volume, fluency, and the performance of having something to say; “power of conversation” implies the rarer social intelligence to listen, pivot, and co-create meaning with another person. The joke is that she has mastered the solo but not the duet.

The intent is not merely to insult a particular woman; it’s to skewer a type Shaw saw everywhere in polite society: the confident talker who treats dialogue as a stage. In his plays, conversation is often combat, seduction, or negotiation, and the winners aren’t the loudest; they’re the ones who can adjust to the other person in real time. By framing conversation as a “power,” Shaw elevates it to a kind of civic skill, as if sociability itself is a form of competence. Lacking it becomes a moral and intellectual failing, not a quirky personality trait.

The subtext bites because it exposes a social asymmetry: speech can be used to dominate, to drown out, to control the temperature of a room. Conversation requires vulnerability and reciprocity, which makes it harder to fake. Shaw, the dramatist, also winks at his own craft: theater is made of talk, but drama is made of people actually meeting each other through talk. The line reads like a drawing-room epigram; it’s really a manifesto for listening disguised as cruelty.