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George Bernard Shaw: Collected Articles, Lectures, Essays and Letters: Thoughts and Studies from the Renowned Dramaturge and Author of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Pygmalion, Arms and The Man, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion

Book by George Bernard Shaw · 50 quotes · Men, Man And Superman, Rebellious

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George Bernard Shaw: Collected Articles, Lectures, Essays and Letters: Thoughts and Studies from the Renowned Dramaturge and Author of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Pygmalion, Arms and The Man, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion Quotes

“Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.”

“Happiness and Beauty are by-products.”

“In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god : everybody worships him and nobody does his will.”

“Those who understand evil pardon it.”

“When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.”

“Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you treat fortune tellers.”

“Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out.”

“If you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have.”

“Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.”

“Fine art is the only teacher except torture.”

“My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt.”

“Once the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible, we crucified it.”

“Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words 'Remember that I too am mortal'.”

“We are told that when Jehovah created the world he saw that it was good what would he say now”

“The only power a god can teach is the power of doing without happiness.”

“Remember always that the least plain sister is the family beauty.”

“Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination.”

“What is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.”

“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.”

“Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.”

“He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.”

“Social progress takes effect through the replacement of all institutions by new ones; and since every institution involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step.”

“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”

“Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.”

“Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.”

“Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.”

“The love of economy is the root of all virtue.”

“Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.”

“There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.”

“A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.”

“Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.”

“Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.”

“We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them.”

“Greatness is one of the sensations of littleness”

“If all the Churches of Europe closed their doors until the drums ceased rolling they would act as a most powerful reminder that though the glory of war is a famous and ancient glory, it is not the final glory of God.”

“Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.”

“What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.”

“Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste.”

“Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.”

“Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.”

“The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.”

“Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.”

“The notion that inspiration is something that happened thousands of years ago, and was then finished and done with. . . the theory that God retired from business at that period and has not been heard from since, is as silly as it is blasphemous.”

“Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.”

“Remember that I too am mortal.”

“Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.”

“Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.”

“Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.”

“The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.”

“Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.”