George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)
Irish playwright, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot.
Your father is a fool skin deep; but you are a fool to your very marrow.
He never invested his whole moral capital in a man, a book, or a cause, but treasured up wisdom wherever it could be picked up, always with scrupulous acknowledgment ... His eclecticism saving him from the cycle of hope-disillusion-despair, his highest effectiveness was as a skirmisher in the daily battle for light and justice, as a critic of new doctrine and a refurbisher of old, as a voice of warning and encouragement. That his action has not been in vain, we can measure by how little Shaw's iconoclasm stirs our blood; we no longer remember what he destroyed that was blocking our view.
I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man.
The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [indicating her body], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.
I know I began as a passion and have ended as a habit, like all husbands.
To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist.
You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.
Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.
No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On.
I wouldn't have ate it, only I'm too lady-like to take it out of my mouth.
Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.
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.
Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.
If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.