George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.
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Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.
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Once the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible, we crucified it.
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Marx's Kapital is not a treatise on socialism; it is a gerrymand against the bourgeoisie. It was supposed to be written for the working class, but the working man respects the bourgeoisie and wants to be a bourgeoisie. Marx never got a hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself, like myself, that painted the flag red. The middle and upper classes are the revolutionary element in society. The proletariat is the conservative element.
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The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
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During the last considerable epidemic at the turn of the century, I was a member of the Health Committee of London Borough Council, and I learned how the credit of vaccination is kept up statistically by diagnosing all the revaccinated cases (of smallpox) as pustular eczema, varioloid or what not---except smallpox.
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The British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding.
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The wheels are turning, but the hamsters are all dead. Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot.
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Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
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The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
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In an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.
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Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.
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If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it.
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Those who understand evil pardon it.
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All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake. Not that it's wrong to try to improve the world if you know how but simply because struggling and striving are the worst possible ways to go about doing anything!
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All roads end at the grave, which is the gate to nothingness.
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The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
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There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
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Opera is when a tenor and soprano want to make love, but are prevented from doing so by a baritone.
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Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.
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Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.
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Emotional excitement reaches men through tea, tobacco, opium, whisky, and religion.
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After all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.
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Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.