George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)
Irish playwright, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.
As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality, he is immortal.
Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.
Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.
Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.
They have redeemed themselves from their vileness, and turned away from their sins. Best of all, they are still not satisfied: the impulse I gave them in that day when I sundered myself in twain and launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force.
That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.
The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.
Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.
I don't want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady.
You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom.
An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.
Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.
The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar! I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day's deed, and think my night's thought.