Justice & Law Quote by George Bernard Shaw

Shaw lands this line like a champagne cork: celebratory pop, then a sting in the eye. The first sentence performs the expected Victorian toast to vitality and possibility. The second detonates it, turning “youth” from a sentimental blessing into a scarce resource squandered on the very people who possess it. That reversal is the engine of the joke, but it’s also the argument: childhood, in Shaw’s view, is not the pure, enchanted state romantic culture sells us. It’s ignorance, dependency, and social training wheels - precisely the conditions least able to use the gifts we mythologize as “youth.”

The subtext is characteristically Shavian: a jab at society’s habit of praising abstractions while mismanaging the humans attached to them. Shaw’s dramas constantly circle institutions (marriage, class, morality) that congratulate themselves for “protecting” people while quietly limiting them. Here, “crime” is doing double duty. It’s hyperbole for comic bite, but it also implies an indictment: we structure life so that energy and openness arrive before agency, education, or power. By the time you can choose freely, the body and the appetite for risk have begun to negotiate their exit.

Context matters: Shaw wrote in an era obsessed with propriety and “innocence,” and he made a career puncturing pieties with paradox. The line flatters the listener with shared cynicism, then pushes further - suggesting that the real waste isn’t personal laziness but a social design flaw. It’s funny because it’s rude; it lingers because it feels uncomfortably plausible.