Genuine, and traceable to the page. The Rev. Anthony Anderson says it to his wife Judith in Act II of The Devil’s Disciple, written in 1897 and first printed in Three Plays for Puritans (London: Grant Richards, 1901), p. 33 — where the wording matches the popular version almost exactly. The one thing quoters lose is that it is a character’s line, delivered with a smile, not a pronouncement in Shaw’s own voice.
“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity” George Bernard Shaw, The Devil's Disciple, Act II — written 1897, first published in Three Plays for Puritans (London: Grant Richards, 1901), p. 33. Spoken by the Rev. Anthony Anderson to his wife Judith. Verified against the first edition — Quotle.info
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Provenance
Act II — a minister teasing his wife
Work
The Devil's Disciple, Act II
Written
1897
First published
Three Plays for Puritans (London: Grant Richards, 1901), p. 33
Speaker
The Rev. Anthony Anderson, to his wife Judith
JUDITH. Oh, I know it’s wrong to hate anybody; but— ANDERSON [going over to her with humorous tenderness] Come, dear, youre not so wicked as you think. The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: thats the essence of inhumanity. After all, my dear, if you watch people carefully, youll be surprised to find how like hate is to love.
The Devil's Disciple, Act II
Transcribed from the scanned 1901 Grant Richards first edition, p. 33, which prints Shaw’s apostrophe-free contractions — “youre,” “thats,” “youll.” The Project Gutenberg text ↗ normalises them to “you’re” and “that’s,” which is the form that circulates today.
1897 — Shaw writes The Devil’s Disciple. The sentence belongs to the Rev. Anthony Anderson in Act II; Quote Investigator ↗ credits Shaw for the words he wrote in that play, while noting they are a character’s and may not reflect his own viewpoint.
1901 — First publication, in Three Plays for Puritans (London: Grant Richards). The line stands on p. 33 of the scanned first edition ↗, in the wording still quoted today.
1909 onward — The sentence leaves the stage. Quote Investigator ↗ records it in The G.B.S. Calendar in 1909 and in Rudolf Flesch’s Book of Unusual Quotations in 1957 — each time ascribed to Shaw, with Anderson and Judith left behind.
Today — The play text is freely readable: Project Gutenberg ↗ carries The Devil’s Disciple, written 1897, as public domain in the United States.
✓Public domain
The Devil’s Disciple was first published in Three Plays for Puritans in 1901 — three decades before the 1931 United States cutoff — so the play text, this line included, is in the US public domain. Project Gutenberg ↗ hosts the full play on exactly that basis.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What goes wrong anyway
Nobody stole this one — Shaw really wrote it. The distortions are subtler: a line of dialogue is promoted to doctrine, a preposition quietly loses a letter, and a different saying about indifference keeps getting filed alongside it.
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Whose wordsShaw, speaking in his own voice Recast
It is dialogue. The Rev. Anthony Anderson says it to his wife Judith, who has just admitted she hates Richard Dudgeon, and the Act II text ↗ stages the delivery as “humorous tenderness.” Quote Investigator ↗ raises the same caution in its conclusion: the words were spoken by a character, and so may not reflect Shaw’s viewpoint.
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Wording“toward our fellow creatures” Variant
Shaw wrote towards. The Americanised form without the -s is common in quotation databases — The Quotations Page ↗ prints “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures…” while citing the same Act II source.
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Confused withElie Wiesel Different quote
“The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference” is a separate saying, routinely pinned on Wiesel. Quote Investigator ↗ credits Wilhelm Stekel’s 1921 The Beloved Ego for it and notes Wiesel used the expression in 1986. Shaw’s line makes a different claim — indifference is worse than hate, not love’s opposite.
✓Shaw wrote it in 1897, and it is there in black and white in the first edition: Three Plays for Puritans (1901), p. 33 ↗. Just remember a country minister is saying it to his wife, and enjoying himself.
Context
What Anderson is actually doing
Judith Anderson has just confessed that she hates Richard Dudgeon — the local blasphemer her husband has cheerfully invited into their house. Her husband, the town minister, does not scold her. The stage direction has him cross the room “with humorous tenderness,” tell her she is not so wicked as she thinks, and hand her the line as a consolation: hating a man at least means you have noticed him.
The consolation is a trap. Anderson goes straight on to argue that married couples torment and police each other while treating their enemies with scrupulous courtesy — so Judith, he says, is probably fonder of Dudgeon than she is of him. She is “strangely touched — even appalled.” The rest of the play spends two acts collecting on that joke. Quoted alone, the moral survives intact; the mischief underneath it does not.
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them.
A note on “fellow creatures”
The phrase gets read today as a line about animals, but in the play it means the neighbours. Anderson is answering one woman’s complaint about one man, and the speech around it is entirely about husbands, wives and enemies in a New Hampshire town during the American Revolution. The sentence travels well into other arguments — it just did not start in one.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1856–1950 · Irish playwright, critic & political activist
Born in Dublin in 1856 and dead in Hertfordshire in 1950, Shaw wrote some sixty plays and spent five decades as the most quotable arguer in the English-speaking world — which is precisely why so many sentences he never wrote end up with his name attached. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and became the first person to add an Academy Award to it, for the screenplay of the 1938 Pygmalion. The Devil’s Disciple (1897) was the biggest success of his first decade in the theatre, an American Revolution melodrama he wrote partly to prove he could beat the melodramatists at their own game.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
Bernard Shaw, “The Devil’s Disciple,” Act II, in Three Plays for Puritans (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 33.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity’?” Last verified 3 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-worst-sin-towards-our-fellow-creatures-is-not-to-hate/