"I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist."
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George Bernard Shaw quotes (page 46 of 68)
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"A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor."
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"The price of ability does not depend on merit but on supply and demand."
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"Not everybody is strong enough to endure life without an anesthetic. Drink probably averts more gross crime than it causes."
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"A child hasn't a grown-up person's appetite for affection. A little of it goes a long way with them; and they like a good imitation of it better than the real thing, as every nurse knows."
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"A critic is one who leaves no turn unstoned."
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"A serious illness or a death advertises the doctor exactly as a hanging advertises the barrister who defended the person hanged."
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"I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another, all would be well with the world. I found when I tried to put that into practice, not only were other people seldom lovable but I wasn't very lovable myself."
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"I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will."
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"The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction."
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"To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God's hand, his brain as God's brain, his purpose as God's purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ."
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"The art of manipulating public opinion, which is a necessary art for the democratic politician, and, like other arts, is sometimespractised with greater virtuosity by knaves than by honest men (who are apt to disdain it), has a different technique in different countries. For instance, in England we excel in whitewashing: in America they excel in tarring and feathering. We strain our nerves and stretch our consciences to avoid a scandal: Americans do the same to make one."
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"I do not, like the Fundamentalists, believe that creation stopped six thousand years ago after a week of hard work. Creation is going on all the time."
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"Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it"
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"Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses."
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"In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization."
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"No child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor."
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"As people get their opinions so largely from the newspapers they read, the corruption of the schools would not matter so much if the Press were free. But the Press is not free. As it costs at least a quarter of a million of money to establish a daily newspaper in London, the newspapers are owned by rich men. And they depend on the advertisements of other rich men. Editors and journalists who express opinions in print that are opposed to the interests of the rich are dismissed and replaced by subservient ones."
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"A man has no business to marry a woman who can't make him miserable. It means she can't make him happy."
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"If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling."
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