George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Fear is choosing the safe course...
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No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who cares for a slave? If you come back, come back for the sake of good fellowship; for you’ll get nothing else.
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When a man of normal habits is ill, everyone hastens to assure him that he is going to recover. When a vegetarian is ill (which fortunately very seldom happens), everyone assures him that he is going to die, and that they told him so, and that it serves him right. They implore him to take at least a little gravy, so as to give himself a chance of lasting out the night...
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Capitalism justified itself and was adopted as an economic principle on the express ground that it provides selfish motives for doing good, and that human beings will do nothing except for selfish motives...
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Lack of money is the root of all evil.
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All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.
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People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
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Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.
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It is the first duty of every man not to be poor.
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You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter;but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!
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Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanginary execution after torture, for its central mystery is an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of equality and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance.
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Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
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The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.
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All young women begin by believing they can change and reform the men they marry. They can't.
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If I were a woman, I'd simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I'd got the vote.
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Faith in reason as a prime motor is no longer the criterion of the sound mind, any more than faith in the Bible is the criterion of righteous intention.
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I really don't think I could consent to go to Heaven if I thought there were no animals there.
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NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Giuseppe? Everything he says is wrong. GIUSEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right.
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The person I miss most is the one I could have been.
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Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.
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You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
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What use are cartridges in battle? I always carry chocolate instead.
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The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.
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You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.