George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.
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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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Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
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Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
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Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.
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A married man is a man with a past, while a bachelor is a man with a future.
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One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
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A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.
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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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I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everybody there looks an original. All other nations are obviously mass produced.
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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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Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks.
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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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Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it.
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Every Englishman believes that Handel now occupies an important position in heaven. If so, le bon Dieu must feel toward him very much as Louis Treize felt toward Richelieu.
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There is at bottom only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate the phagocytes.
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It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.
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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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Deep knowledge is not knowledge of the thing itself, but knowledge of a thing like the thing. Then, you gain not one knowledge, but two knowledges. Of the thing. And of the original thing with is like the thing. Which is the barbarism of the privileged class.
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My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.
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If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman's pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog.
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Changeable women are more endurable that monotonous ones; they are sometimes murdered but never deserted.
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Your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!
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All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.