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George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Liza: My aunt died of influenza: so they said … But it's my belief (as how) they done the old woman in.
George Bernard Shaw
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Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.
George Bernard Shaw
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Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.
George Bernard Shaw
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Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.
George Bernard Shaw
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When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
George Bernard Shaw
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All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
George Bernard Shaw
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The greatest of our evils and the worst of our crimes is poverty.
George Bernard Shaw
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We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!
George Bernard Shaw
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The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
George Bernard Shaw
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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.
George Bernard Shaw
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I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly tell our children that honesty is the best policy.
George Bernard Shaw
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It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.
George Bernard Shaw
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The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.
George Bernard Shaw
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Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make … lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.
George Bernard Shaw
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The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.
George Bernard Shaw
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There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates, who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.
George Bernard Shaw
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A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.
George Bernard Shaw
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You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
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The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.
George Bernard Shaw
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The one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man.
George Bernard Shaw
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It is greatly to Mrs Patrick Campbell's credit that, bad as the play was, her acting was worse.
Review of Sardou Fedora 1 June 1895
George Bernard Shaw
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The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.
George Bernard Shaw
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That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her.
George Bernard Shaw
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You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
George Bernard Shaw
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[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.
George Bernard Shaw
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Quote of the day
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor.
Ogden Nash
George Bernard Shaw
Creative Commons
Born:
July 26, 1856
Died:
November 2, 1950
(aged 94)
Bio:
George Bernard Shaw was a Nobel Prize and Oscar-winning Irish playwright, critic and socialist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics stretched from the 1880s to his death in 1950.
Known for:
Pygmalion (1913)
Man and Superman (1903)
Major Barbara (1905)
Arms and the Man (1906)
Saint Joan (1924)
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George Bernard Shaw on Wikipedia
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