George Bernard Shaw: Trending quotes (page 19)

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“The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.”

George Bernard Shaw

#55
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Money , Strong

“Shaw: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?
Actress: My goodness, Well, I'd certainly think about it
Shaw: Would you sleep with me for a pound?
Actress: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!
Shaw: Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling over the price.”

George Bernard Shaw

Similar remarks are also attributed to Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx and to Mark Twain
Disputed

Thinking , Sleep

“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface
1900s, Getting Married (1908)

Death , People , Passion , Parting

“The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.”

George Bernard Shaw

Act II
1890s, The Philanderer (1893)

Love , Women

“That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.”

George Bernard Shaw Fanny's First Play

Fanny's First Play, Epilogue
1910s

“When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of “Orthodoxy, True and False” and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.”

George Bernard Shaw

#172
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Falseness

“Again, there is the illusion of "increased command over Nature," meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man's increased command over Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us.”

George Bernard Shaw

Notes
1890s, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)

Nature , Country

“Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.”

George Bernard Shaw book The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, Chapter 82 http://books.google.com/books?id=ys13gZliXFAC (1928)
1920s

Life , Death , Women , Men

“I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.”

George Bernard Shaw

Interview "Who I Am, and What I Think", in Frank Harris's periodical The Candid Friend (May 1901), reprinted in Sixteen Self Sketches, 1949, p. 53; quoted in Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 1984, p. 42 https://books.google.it/books?id=V5KvCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA42
1900s

“The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.”

George Bernard Shaw Three Plays for Puritans

Three Plays for Puritans, Preface (1900)
1900s

Fashion

“There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates, who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface; Cruelty's Excuses
1930s, On the Rocks (1933)

“The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.”

George Bernard Shaw

#158
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

World

“He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.”

George Bernard Shaw

#105
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Beauty , Wine , Happiness

“You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom.”

George Bernard Shaw

1910s, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)

Children , Girl , Boy , Parent

“We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.”

George Bernard Shaw You Never Can Tell

You Never Can Tell, Act I (1898)
1890s

“It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.”

George Bernard Shaw

#65
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

“Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw

The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

Life , Imagination

“All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense.”

George Bernard Shaw

1900s, Love Among the Artists (1900)

Fashion , Sense

“Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make … lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface
1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

Life , Men , Nature

“All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.”

George Bernard Shaw

Pilate, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator
1930s, On the Rocks (1933)