George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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The function of comedy is to dispelunconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysisright on to it.
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The pianoforte is the most important of all musical instruments; its invention was to music what the invention of printing was to poetry.
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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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Don't waste time collecting other people's autographs; rather devote it to making your own autograph worth collecting.
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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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It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
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Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him. Even if I did not, I should pretend to; for a taste in his music is a mark of caste among musicians, and should be worn, like a tall hat, by the amateur who wishes to pass for a true Brahmin.
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When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.
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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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Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment.
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An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.
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What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
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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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The capacity of any conqueror is more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary.
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It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles.
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Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.
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We call the one side [of humanity] religion, and we call the other science. Religion is always right. ... Science is always wrong; it is the very artifice of men. Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.
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To make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy. To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy.
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I do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it. ...I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends.
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Well, sir, you never can tell. That's a principle in life with me, sir, if you'll excuse my having such a thing.
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A dinner! How horrible! I am to be made the pretext for killing all those wretched animals and birds, and fish! Thank you for nothing. Now if it were to be a fast instead of a feast; say a solemn three days' abstention from corpses in my honour, I could at least pretend to believe that it was disinterested. Blood sacrifices are not in my line...
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It's well to be off with the Old Woman before you're on with the New.
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I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that.
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Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head.