There is a popular statement on the Internet attributed to the Irish writer that, despite the development of technological progress, we must not forget about humanity. We decided to check if he said something similar.

The phrase indicating Shaw's authorship is often found on sites with selections famous quotes personalities, as well as on educational And entertaining portals. Social network users (“VKontakte", X, Facebook*, Instagram*, Pinterest) And blogging platforms actively share this quote. The phrase is also present on Shaw’s page in “Wikiquote“However, unlike most other quotes, its source is not indicated.

George Bernard Shaw - Irish writer, Nobel Prize winner in literature, opinion some critics, the most important English-language playwright since William Shakespeare. Since Shaw's death in 1950, his literary legacy, diaries, letters and other surviving written sources have been carefully studied and digitized, so it is not difficult to verify whether a particular statement belongs to him.

In English, the saying about birds, fish and people is no less popular than in Russian, and it is also often attributed to Shaw (although there are other variants, for example Maxim Gorky or Martin Luther King). "Verified" tried to find this phrase in works Show, as well as on reputable resources specializing in the study of his legacy - sites International Shaw Society And British Shaw Society, founded during the life of the playwright. It was not possible to find the exact quote or at least a variant close to it in meaning. Apparently, attribute The show began this aphorism only in the 21st century, and, as often happens in the case of incorrect attribution, without specifying the specific work.

At the same time, other versions of authorship, common in the English-speaking segment of the Internet, are closer to the truth. American civil rights activist Martin Luther King actually included this expression in his Nobel lecture in 1964 - however, in his interpretation we are talking not just about humanity, but about fraternal relations between people: “The richer we become materially, the poorer we become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly through the air like birds and to swim through the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together like brothers.”

Quote Investigator Project found the earlier mention of this aphorism is not literal, but close in meaning. In 1925, an American historian and journalist (and member Ku Klux Klan and supporter eugenics) Lothrop Stoddard in his work "Social classes in post-war Europe"Attributed it to Maxim Gorky. However, the Soviet classic, most likely, was not its original author either. Stoddard tells a story that allegedly happened to Gorky: after the writer gave a speech to a predominantly peasant audience on the topic of science and technological progress, one of the listeners objected to him with the same phrase about birds, fish and people. Whether this actually happened is unknown, since such a story could not be found either in the works and letters of Gorky, or in the memoirs of his contemporaries.

However, in 1927, the almanac “Circle” published Gorky’s article “Writer's Notes" At the very beginning, he writes: “A person of the 20th century begins to think like this: “I fly in the air, swim under water, I can move on the ground at a speed that was not previously thought of...” <...> At the same time, he continues to live extremely badly and treats his “neighbor”, those like himself, more and more poorly.” Despite the fact that the wording is significantly different from what is being analyzed, the meaning is quite close.

Later, the writer returned to this idea in a similar formulation in another of his articles - “The drought will be destroyed”, which was published in the newspaper “Komsomolskaya Pravda” in 1931. Gorky writes: “It [the human mind] taught us to fly through the air, swim under water, it gave the human voice fabulous power - we learned to speak to each other across distances of thousands of kilometers.” Further in the article, he draws attention several times to the fact that in the capitalist world, despite technological progress, man is a wolf to man, which in general also corresponds to the meaning of the quote being analyzed. Despite the fact that both the first and second articles were published several years after the publication of Stoddard’s book and no peasant was mentioned in them, Gorky could well have given a similar speech, received the above-mentioned audience response to it, and subsequently included these thoughts in the article.

Thus, Verified was unable to find evidence that Bernard Shaw had anything to do with the quote about mankind's acquired ability to fly like birds and swim like fish, but lack the ability to live like humans. This statement, in a very similar formulation, was in use long before the playwright’s death, and they began to attribute it to Shaw only in the early 2000s.

Cover photo: National Gallery of Ireland

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