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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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We mustn't be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.
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I do not, like the Fundamentalists, believe that creation stopped six thousand years ago after a week of hard work. Creation is going on all the time.
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Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final.
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The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.
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The chief objection to playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player.
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Nowadays a parlor maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective.
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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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Changeable women are more endurable that monotonous ones; they are sometimes murdered but never deserted.
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What, or who, led you to take up photography, and about what date ? George Bernard Shaw – I always wanted to draw and paint. I had no literary ambition. I aspired to be a Michelangelo, not a Shakespeare. But I could not draw well enough to satisfy myself; and the instruction I could get was worse than useless. So when dry plates and push buttons came into the market I bought a box camera and began pushing the button. It was in 1898.
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Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.
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When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
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Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?Making life means making trouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things.
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There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
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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.
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Capitalism justified itself and was adopted as an economic principle on the express ground that it provides selfish motives for doing good, and that human beings will do nothing except for selfish motives...
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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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What is the use of straining after an amiable view of things, when a cynical view is most likely to be the true one?
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Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.
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Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
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When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.
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The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.
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Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.
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The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.