George Bernard Shaw citations

Page 8

“The greatest doer must also be the greatest dreamer”

“La vie égalise tous les hommes; la mort en révèle les éminents.”

“Celui qui donne de l'argent qu'il n'a pas gagné est généreux avec le travail d'autrui.”

“Méfie-toi de l'homme dont le Dieu est dans les cieux.”

“Il y a deux sortes de savants : les spécialistes, qui connaissent tout sur rien, et les philosophes, qui ne connaissent rien sur tout.”

“Celui qui peut, agit. Celui qui ne peut pas, donne des leçons.”

“Ne fais pas aux autres ce que tu voudrais qu'ils te fassent. Leurs goûts peuvent être différents.”

“Ce que personne ne croit a besoin d'être démontré aussi souvent que possible.”

“L'art du gouvernement consiste à organiser l'idolâtrie.”

“Il y a cinquante manières de dire Oui, et cinq cents de dire Non, mais il n'y a qu'une manière de les écrire.”

“L'homme raisonnable s'adapte au monde; l'homme déraisonnable essaye d'adapter le monde à lui. Tout progrès dépend donc de l'homme déraisonnable.”

“La bureaucratie consiste en fonctionnaires; l'aristocratie, en idoles; la démocratie, en idolâtres.”

“Dans la vie, il y a deux catégories d’individus :
Ceux qui regardent le monde tel qu’il est et se demandent pourquoi.
Ceux qui imaginent le monde tel qu’il devrait être et qui se disent : pourquoi pas?”

“Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making
trouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things.”

“I want to be thoroughly used up when I die for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.”

“We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation”

“Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.”

“Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?”

“A happy familiy is but an earlier heaven.”

“Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.”

“What is life but a series of inspired follies…”

“I believe in the discipline of silence, and could talk for hours about it.”

“If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.”

“A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.”

“No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.”

“I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself.”

“You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.”

“I had not achieved a success; but I provoked an uproar; and the sensation was so agreeable that I resolved to try again.”

“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.”

“The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.”

“A critic recently described me, with deadly acuteness, as having 'a kindly dislike of my fellow-creatures.' Perhaps dread would have been nearer the mark than dislike; for man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.”

“The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [indicating her body], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.”

“Well, of course, they notice you. You always hide just in the middle of the limelight.”

“Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.”

“You in America should trust to that volcanic political instinct which I have divined in you.”

“Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.”

“If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.”

“God is on the side of the big battalions.”

“I don’t want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I might want to kill…I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioner and say every 5 years or every 7 years…just put them there and say, ‘Sir or madam will you be kind enough to justify your existence…if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little bit more then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive. Because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.”

“I heard your prayers Thank God it's all over!”

“Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.”

“Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.”