George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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There is no accomplishment so easy to acquire as politeness and none more profitable.
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The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
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Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
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The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
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Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.
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It is nearly 50 years since I was assured by a conclave of doctors that if I did not eat meat I should die of starvation.
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When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.
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A succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.
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I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.
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The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
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The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.
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Oh, come! That boot is on the other leg. Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that...
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Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.
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It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.
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We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time, or we shall stick in the mud. Yet neither must we undertake a new world as catastrophic Utopians, and wreck our civilization in our hurry to mend it.
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The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.
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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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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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A man without an address is a vagabond; a man with two addresses is a libertine.
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The real pleasure of one's life is the devotion to a great objective of one's consideration.
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My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I'm a free citizen.
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We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.
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Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.
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Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool.