"The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas."
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Quote collection
George Bernard Shaw quotes (page 26 of 68)
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"Englishmen never will be slaves; they are free to do whatever the government and public opinion allow them."
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"Take the utmost care to get well born and well brought up."
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"Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality."
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"A modern gentleman [rich person] is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner."
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"Money is a most important thing in the world."
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"What God hath joined together no man shall put asunder: God will take care of that."
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"Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or religion."
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"Nobody can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure time for freedom than unconventionality does."
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"No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn't actually fall down."
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"Woman's happiness begins with her first love and ends about then"
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"One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't."
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"Every child has a right to its own bent. . . . It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father."
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"What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts."
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"Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance."
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"In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every private employer a dictator, every financier a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at his mercy, and no public responsibility."
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"Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance."
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"I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it."
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"No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect."
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"Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable."
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