Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Poverty, Shaw needles, is not a condition you simply fall into; its a full-time job with brutal startup costs. The line flips the usual moral melodrama - that the poor are either tragic victims or virtuous saints - into a colder economic joke: being poor is expensive. You need time to wait in lines, navigate petty bureaucracies, endure illness without rest, patch things instead of replacing them, and live one bad week away from collapse. Only someone with hidden buffers can "afford" that kind of fragility.

Shaw’s wit does two things at once. It punctures the Victorian-era habit of treating poverty as a personal failing, while also skewering the complacency of the middle classes who imagine hardship as character-building. In his plays and polemics, Shaw was allergic to sentimental charity; he preferred structural indictment. This quip is a miniature of that politics: it suggests that the social order is so rigged that deprivation itself demands resources - stamina, spare time, social capital, even a certain physical resilience. If you’re sick, elderly, supporting children, or simply unlucky, poverty stops being an "identity" and becomes an unpayable bill.

Context matters: late-19th and early-20th century Britain was wrestling with slums, workhouses, and the emerging welfare state. Shaw, a Fabian socialist, aims the line at policymakers and moralizers alike. The real scandal isn’t that people are poor; it’s that society makes survival so administratively and materially costly that only a few can manage it for long.