George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.
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Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.
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If you cannot attain knowledge without torturing a dog, you must do without knowledge.
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You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.
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A great social reformer.
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They have accepted the burden of eternal life. They have taken the agony from birth; and their life does not fail them even in the hour of their destruction.
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Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous.
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It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.
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Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.
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I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
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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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Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
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The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.
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New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.
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When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.
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The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.
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The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.
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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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All great truths begin as blasphemies.
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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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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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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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The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.
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The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.