Daily Inspiration Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw takes the Victorian halo around "virtue" and yanks it down into the realm of labor politics, where demands are negotiated, not sanctified. Calling virtue "the Trade Unionism of the married" is a deliberately cheeky demotion: morality becomes collective bargaining, and marriage becomes an industry with its own rules, protections, and enforcement mechanisms.

The line works because it weaponizes a then-hot cultural anxiety. Trade unionism, in Shaw's world, was synonymous with working-class organization, pressure tactics, and the inconvenient fact that power congeals when people coordinate. By grafting that onto marriage, he suggests that what society praises as personal purity is often a group strategy: a married class policing behavior to keep its economic and sexual order stable. Virtue, in this framing, isn't an inner light; it's a labor agreement that benefits insiders. It sets wages (what spouses owe), regulates workplace conduct (desire, fidelity, reputation), and punishes scabs (the unfaithful, the unmarried, the socially improvident).

Shaw's subtext is less "marriage is bad" than "moral language is a cover story". He suspects that lofty ideals are frequently retrofitted justifications for material arrangements: inheritance, property, legitimacy, women's constrained options, men's entitlement to respectability. The joke has teeth because it treats virtue as institutional, not mystical - a social technology designed to reduce risk and maintain bargaining power. And like any union, it can protect the vulnerable while also becoming exclusionary, self-righteous, and coercive.