George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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Virtue is insufficient temptation.
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Nobody can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure time for freedom than unconventionality does.
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In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as 1 percent of us could give physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.
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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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Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say 'No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.
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Democracy is a word all public men use and none understand.
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Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.
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Christmas is forced upon a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred.
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The statesman cannot govern without stability of belief, true or false.
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If 'Pygmalion' is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary.
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I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough.
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The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
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A serious illness or a death advertises the doctor exactly as a hanging advertises the barrister who defended the person hanged.
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They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this . . . because . . . I am a natural-born mountebank.
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Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.
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Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something.
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If a woman can, by careful selection of a father and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it.
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The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
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Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries.
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The notion that disarmament can put a stop to war is contradicted by the nearest dogfight.
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The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else.
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The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.
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I like to quote myself frequently and often, it makes me sound much more intelligent than I actually am.