George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
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The seven deadly sins... food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.
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A great social reformer.
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A family is a tyranny ruled over by it's weakest member.
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It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.
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It is always necessary to overstate a cast startlingly to make people sit up and listen to it, and to frighten them into acting on it.
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Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
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The art of manipulating public opinion, which is a necessary art for the democratic politician, and, like other arts, is sometimespractised with greater virtuosity by knaves than by honest men (who are apt to disdain it), has a different technique in different countries. For instance, in England we excel in whitewashing: in America they excel in tarring and feathering. We strain our nerves and stretch our consciences to avoid a scandal: Americans do the same to make one.
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All sorts of bodily diseases are produced by half-used minds.
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Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
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The only sensible person is my tailor. He measures me anew each time he sees me.
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I am a sort of collector of religions: and the curious thing is that I find I can believe in them all.
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To withhold deserved praise lest it should make its object conceited is as dishonest as to withhold payment of a just debt lest your creditor should spend the money badly.
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Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.
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For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.
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In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
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The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.
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The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.
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I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.
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The stock actor is a stage calamity...
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Happiness and Beauty are by-products.
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Though justice be Thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy.
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The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.