What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that youthful idealism is often associated with emotional fervor, while adulthood brings the necessity of pragmatic thinking.
George Bernard Shaw's quote reflects the transition from youthful passion to adult pragmatism, implying that in one's twenties, one is likely to be driven by ideals and emotional beliefs such as communism. By the thirties, however, the need for financial stability and practicality tends to lead individuals towards capitalist ideas, suggesting that one must adapt their mindset in accordance with maturity and life experience.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a political discussion to illustrate the evolution of beliefs from youth to adulthood.
More from George Bernard Shaw
All quotes βMarriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.
The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
Similar quotes
Morality is the herd-instinct in the individual.
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny.
To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.
That neither our thoughts, nor passions, nor ideas formed by the imagination, exist without the mind, is what every body will allow.
For 179 years [The Book of Mormon] has been examined and attacked, denied and deconstructed, targeted and torn apart like perhaps no other religious history β perhaps like no other book in any religious history- and still, it stands.