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George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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Famous George Bernard Shaw Quotes

“Marriage is tolerable enough in its way if youre easygoing and dont expect too much from it. But it doesnt bear thinking about.”

“The politician who once had to learn to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.”

“You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell: All hope abandon ye who enter here.”

“This is the true joy in life: Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

“Girls, like men, want to be petted, pitied, and made much of, when they are diffident, in low spirits, or in unrequited love. These are services which the weak cannot render to the strong and which the strong will not render to the weak, except when there is also a difference of sex.”

“God help England if she had no Scots to think for her.”

“Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.”

“[...] any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.”

“A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.”

“What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.”

“No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.”

“The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.”

“Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.”

“Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.”

“Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.”

“Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.”

“If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.”