George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
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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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You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell.
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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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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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The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.
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The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
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A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.
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It is always necessary to overstate a cast startlingly to make people sit up and listen to it, and to frighten them into acting on it.
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The reasonable man will adjust to the demands of his environment. The unreasonable man expects his environment to adjust to his own needs. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
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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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The danger of crippling thought, the danger of obstructing the formation of the public mind by specially suppressing ... representations is far greater than any real danger that there is from such representations.
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I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?
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No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn't actually fall down.
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Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.
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The best way to get your point across is to entertain.
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Indifference is the essence of inhumanity.
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Hypocrisy ... is only bad when it is improperly used.
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If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
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We are all victims of the violence that animals suffer... their liberation is also our liberation.
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Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.
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I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. . . . I tell you, gentlemen, if you can shew a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally.
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All great truths begin as blasphemies.
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Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders.