George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Wise kings wear shabby clothes, and leave the gold lace to the drum major.
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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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Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
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Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.
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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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Get out of my way; for I won't stop for you.
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Without danger I cannot be great. That is how I pay for Abel's blood. Danger and fear follow my steps everywhere. Without them courage would have no sense. And it is courage, courage, courage that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.
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People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.
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Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.
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Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.
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Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good.
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The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction.
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We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself.
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A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.
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The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.
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If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.
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Changeable women are more endurable that monotonous ones; they are sometimes murdered but never deserted.
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The average age (longevity) of a meat eater is 63. I am on the verge of 85 and still work as hard as ever. I have lived quite long enough and am trying to die; but I simply cannot do it. A single beef-steak would finish me; but I cannot bring myself to swallow it. I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.
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The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.
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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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If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.
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The Anti-Vivisector does not deny that physiologists must make experiments and even take chances with new methods. He says that they must not seek knowledge by criminal methods, just as they must not make money by criminal methods. He does not object to Galileo dropping cannon balls from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa; but he would object to shoving off two dogs or American tourists.
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When commenting on the turmoil and disorder of the world, If the other planets are inhabited, they must be using this earth as their insane asylum.
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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.