George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Two people getting together to write a book is like three people getting together to have a baby. One of them is superfluous.
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We have in England a curious belief in first-rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable second-rateness of the people we do know.
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I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, ininvention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.
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We are told that when Jehovah created the world he saw that it was good what would he say now...
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Every child has a right to its own bent. . . . It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father.
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The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing.
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There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.
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Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce greatpoetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.
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Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.
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Reviewing has one advantage over suicide: in suicide you take it out on yourself; in reviewing you take it out on other people.
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Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
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Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from their riches. They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position; they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and do useful work. But this means that they do not live like rich people at all, and might therefore just as well have ordinary incomes.
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Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.
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When you prevent me from doing anything I want to do, that is persecution; when I prevent you from doing anything you want to do, that is law, order, and morals.
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You have a choice of trusting the natural stability of gold, or the honesty and intelligence of members of government.
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Don't ask me for promises until I know what I am promising.
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I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.
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There is only one universal passion fear.
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People exaggerate the value of things they haven't got everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with them.
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Nobody supposes that doctors are less virtuous than judges; but a judge whose salary and reputation depended on whether the verdict was for plaintiff or defendant, prosecutor or prisoner, would be as little trusted as a general in the pay of the enemy.
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Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.
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Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.
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Who is this Baby Ruth? And what does she do?
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Your heart and your mouth will be in two separate parts of your body if you again forget in whose presence you stand.