George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950,) often known at his insistence just as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist. He is considered the greatest English-language playwright after Shakespeare.
Born in Dublin to Anglo-Irish Protestant parents, Shaw left school at 16, moved to London, and got into politics in his twenties as a socialist. He devoted many years to becoming a novelist but was a great failure. He found work as a theater-, art-, and music-critic, and set about to develop the performers’ standards and his audiences’ artistic tastes.
Shaw then turned to write plays. During a long and celebrated career, he wrote more than 50 plays, including Man and Superman (1902,) Major Barbara (1905,) and Saint Joan (1923.) His most famous play was Pygmalion (1912,) on the subject of a cockney girl who learns to become respectable in the high society of Edwardian London. This novel became the source for the musical and the movie My Fair Lady (1964.)
Shaw was provocatively opinionated and gained a reputation as a witty and sharp public speaker. Oscar Wilde once said of Shaw, “he has no enemies; and none of his friends like him.”
Shaw’s range of interest and inquiry included vivisection, vegetarianism, religion, language, cinema, and photography.
Shaw won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925 and an Oscar in 1938 for his contribution to the musical film My Fair Lady, becoming the first person to have been awarded both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by George Bernard Shaw
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Servants
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Sacrifice
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
—George Bernard Shaw
No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Education
The love of fairplay is a spectator’s virtue, not a principal’s.
—George Bernard Shaw
Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.
—George Bernard Shaw
We admit that when the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible we crucified it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Greatness
Those who understand evil pardon it : those who resent it destroy it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Courage, Risk, Experience
The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.
—George Bernard Shaw
When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Crime
Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Liberty, Equality
Youth is wasted on the young.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Youth
Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Truth
The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Religion
No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.
—George Bernard Shaw
If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.
—George Bernard Shaw
In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Heaven, Greatness
The most popular method of distributing wealth is the method of the roulette table.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Gambling
You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright: you are the window through which you must see the world.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Virtue, Virtues, Integrity, Honor, Accomplishment
It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Thought, Thoughts
Some men see things as they are and say, “Why?” I dream things that never were, and say, “Why not?”
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Dreams, Perspective, Imagination, Vision
To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit : to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Greatness
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Change
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.
—George Bernard Shaw
You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.
—George Bernard Shaw
A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Philosophy, Education
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Happiness, Service
Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Crime and Punishment
The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: The Unconscious Self
The relation of master and servant is advantageous only to masters who do not scruple to abuse their authority, and to servants who do not scruple to abuse their trust.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Servants
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge : it is more dangerous than ignorance.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Education, Knowledge
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.
—George Bernard Shaw
The person I miss most is the one I could have been.
—George Bernard Shaw
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Royalty
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Literature, Books
If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.
—George Bernard Shaw
Greatness is only one of the sensations of littleness.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Greatness
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Crime and Punishment
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: That’s the essence of inhumanity.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Sin, Humanity, Indifference
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