"That older and greater church to which I belong: the church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice"
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Quote collection
George Bernard Shaw quotes (page 67 of 68)
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"I don't know what to say about this book. The experience on which it is founded is so extraordinary, that an honest record of it should be preserved . . . But it would have driven me mad; and I am not sure that the author came out of it without a slight derangement."
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"Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions."
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"Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification."
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"Everyone can see that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who don't are the wrong ones."
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"Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus."
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"Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good."
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"The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men."
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"The salvation of the world depends on the men who will not take evil good-humouredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him."
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"Communism, being the lay form of Catholicism, and indeed meaning the same thing, has never had any lack of chaplains."
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"Christianity as a specific doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and utterly. He was hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you please), before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the level of the thing it has remained ever since."
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"The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient."
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"The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators."
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"It would positively be a relief to me to dig Shakespeare up and throw stones at him."
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"You can rave about Stravinsky without the slightest risk of being classified as a lunatic by the next generation ."
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"The poor silly-clever Irishman takes off his hat to God's Englishman."
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"Don't ask me for promises until I know what I am promising."
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"I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them."
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"Just as the liar 's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed , but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent."
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"Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think."
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