George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.
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No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare.
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I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats.
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When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.
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The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.
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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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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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I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.
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The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary. rather tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven and making a prolonged and intolerable noise.
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Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
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The Englishmen is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.
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Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best! . . . The reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete that everybody acts on strictly business principles.
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I learned more from the first stupid woman who fell in love with me than ever my brains taught me.
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I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another, all would be well with the world. I found when I tried to put that into practice, not only were other people seldom lovable but I wasn't very lovable myself.
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Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.
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Social progress takes effect through the replacement of all institutions by new ones; and since every institution involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step.
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The business man - the man to whom age brings golf instead of wisdom.
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History, sir, will tell lies as usual.
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Some of the things Mussolini has done, and some that he is threatening to do go further in the direction of Socialism than the English Labour Party could yet venture if they were in power.'
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Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.
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The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
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Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
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I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettishness, without being either good business men or fine judges of literature.
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The haughty American nation ... makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a bootblack.