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Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly.
--
Jacques Barzun, in "Bernard Shaw in Twilight" in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943).

 

George Bernard Shaw

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Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly. To his contemporaries it appeared frivolous and contradictory to perform as both superman and socialist, sceptic and believer, legalist and heretic, high-brow and mob-orator. But feeling the duty to teach as well as to mirror mankind, Shaw did not accept himself as a contradictory being.

 

Jacques Barzun

 

That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.

 

George Bernard Shaw

 

Almost every messianic movement in the world came into being as a result of hallucinatory visions of a prophet. One point must be emphasized about the prophet of a messianic movement: He is not a schizophrenic, as was so long assumed. A schizophrenic with religious paranoia will state that he is God, Jesus, the Great Spirit, or some other supernatural being. The prophet, on the other hand, never states that he is supernatural--only that he has been in contact with supernatural powers. (Of course, after his death, his disciples tend to deify him or at least give him saintly status.)

 

Peter Farb

 

It was fun yet challenging to play the dual roles. I'm a really nice guy, and the character [of Dubious] is egocentric and hard-edged, so I had to pull out the negative aspects of me to attribute to the role.

 

Carson Grant

 

Now, if Mr. Shaw and Mr. Saroyan are poles apart, no comparison between the two, one great and the other nothing, one a genius and the other a charlatan, let me repeat that if you must know which writer has influenced my writing when influences are real and for all I know enduring, then that writer has been George Bernard Shaw. I shall in my own day influence a young writer or two somewhere or other, and no one need worry about that.
Young Shaw, hello out there.

 

William Saroyan