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Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you treat fortune tellers.
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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.
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Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders.
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There is only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory. For without that you cannot be born again.
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Hell is full of musical amateurs.
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God is on the side of the big battalions.
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In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.
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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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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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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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The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
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There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
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All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.
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You have no right to say that I am not sincere. I have found a happiness in art that real life has never given me. I am intensely in earnest about art. There is is a magic and mystery in art that you know nothing of.
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Seemingly unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. Much progress, therefore, depends on such people.
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Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.
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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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Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.
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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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As long as more people will pay admission to a theater to see a naked body than to see a naked brain, the drama will languish.
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Though the Life Force supplies us with its own purpose, it has no other brains to work with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads.
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Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.
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Trade unionism is not socialism. It is the capitalism of the proletariat.
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The only sensible person is my tailor. He measures me anew each time he sees me.