George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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How you ought properly to spell 'fish' in English: 'goti' .
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I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.
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In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.
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Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.
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I had patience with them for many ages: they tried me very sorely. They did terrible things: they embraced death, and said that eternal life was a fable. I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made...
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As people get their opinions so largely from the newspapers they read... But the Press is not free, the newspapers are owned by rich men.
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When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
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Lack of money is the root of all evil.
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I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it.
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That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her.
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If you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have.
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The only way in which a nation can make itself wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping: that is, by providing for its wants in the order of their importance, and allowing no money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until necessities have been thoroughly served.
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Education can and should do much influence social, moral and intellectual discovery by stimulating critical attitudes of thought in the young
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Fear is choosing the safe course...
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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.
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The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it soundslike.It isimpossible foran Englishmanto openhis mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.
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Communism, being the lay form of Catholicism, and indeed meaning the same thing, has never had any lack of chaplains.
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Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
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Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice...
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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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In the arts of peace Man is a bungler.
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You know, Tolstoy, like myself, wasn't taken in by superstitions like science and medicine.
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Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.