"All progress depends upon the unreasonable person."
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Quote collection
George Bernard Shaw quotes (page 20 of 68)
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"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."
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"What is life but a series of inspired follies."
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"Liberty is the breath of life to nations."
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"It is monstrous that custom should force us to display our faces ostentatiously, however worn and wrinkled and mean they may be, whilst carefully concealing all our other parts, however shapely and well preserved."
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"I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation."
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"If you teach a man anything, he will never learn."
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"There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains."
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"The real pleasure of one's life is the devotion to a great objective of one's consideration."
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"From a very early age, I've had to interrupt my education to go to school."
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"Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not."
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"The popular definition of tragedy is heavy drama in which everyone is killed in the last act, comedy being light drama in which everyone is married in the last act."
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"Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it."
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"I was always unlawful; I broke the law when I was born because my parents weren't married."
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"Property is organized robbery."
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"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."
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"This is the true joy of life-the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown to the scrap-heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances."
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"It is the highest creatures who take the longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity."
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"What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real."
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"The art of government is the organisation of idolatry."
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