Wit & Attitude Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw’s line is a neat little scalpel: it cuts through moral language to expose the mushy tissue underneath. The target isn’t just stupidity in the IQ sense; it’s the thick-headed self-certainty that lets people do ugly things while feeling virtuous. “Duty” becomes the costume shame puts on when it needs to walk in public.

The brilliance is in the psychology. Shame is an inward signal: I know this is wrong, or at least suspect it. Shaw suggests the “stupid man” can’t metabolize that discomfort honestly, so he reaches for a ready-made social alibi. Duty is perfect because it’s impersonal. It shifts responsibility upward (orders, tradition, family, country, God) and outward (everyone expects it), turning a private moral failure into a public performance of righteousness. If you call it duty, you don’t have to argue about consequences; you just have to obey.

That’s classic Shaw: the dramatist’s ear for how people talk when they’re lying to themselves, and the satirist’s suspicion of solemn rhetoric. In his era of stiff respectability, imperial confidence, and institutional pieties, “duty” was a kind of moral currency - spendable in parliament, in the pulpit, in the home. Shaw flips it into counterfeit money.

The subtext lands uncomfortably close to home: the most dangerous actions are often the ones wrapped in a noble tone, because that wrapping recruits bystanders. It’s not only the doer who’s being fooled; it’s everyone listening who’s being invited to stop thinking.