George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
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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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Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
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If you demand my authorities for this and that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority.
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The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.
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Most people do not pray; they only beg.
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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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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.
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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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Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
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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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You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.
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When men die of disease they are said to die from natural causes. When they recover (and mostly they do) the doctor gets the credit of curing them.
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During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I[urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enactingthat all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner's jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.
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Nationalism must now be added to the refuse pile of superstitions. We are now citizens of the world, and the man who divides the race into elect Irishmen and reprobate foreign devils (especially Englishmen) had better live on the Blaskets where he can admire himself without disturbance.
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You cannot learn to skate without making yourself ridiculous - the ice of life is slippery.
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Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
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What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man's fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him?--as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!
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History, sir, will tell lies as usual.
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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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Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
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I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
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My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt.
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From a very early age, I've had to interrupt my education to go to school.