“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.”

— George Bernard Shaw

“George Bernard Shaw reopens capital punishment controversy”, Paramount British Pictures (March 5, 1931)
1930s

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "I don’t want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I might want to kill…I think it wou…" by George Bernard Shaw?

George Bernard Shaw 413

Irish playwright 1856–1950

Related quotes

“Yeah, the good news about the move to abolish the death tax, the tax where they come and look at how much money you've got when you die, how much gold is in your teeth and they want half of it, is that — you're right, there's an exemption for — I don't know — maybe a million dollars now, and it's scheduled to go up a little bit. However, 70 percent of the American people want to abolish that tax. Congress, the House and Senate, have three times voted to abolish it. The president supports abolishing it, so that tax is going to be abolished. I think it speaks very much to the health of the nation that 70-plus percent of Americans want to abolish the death tax, because they see it as fundamentally unjust. The argument that some who played at the politics of hate and envy and class division will say, 'Yes, well, that's only 2 percent,' or as people get richer 5 percent in the near future of Americans likely to have to pay that tax. I mean, that's the morality of the Holocaust. 'Well, it's only a small percentage,' you know. 'I mean, it's not you, it's somebody else.' And this country, people who may not make earning a lot of money the centerpiece of their lives, they may have other things to focus on, they just say it's not just. If you've paid taxes on your income once, the government should leave you alone. Shouldn't come back and try and tax you again.”

Grover Norquist (1956) Conservative Lobbyist

interview with NPR's Terry Gross on the program Fresh Air, October 2, 2003.
2003

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

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright

“I think that I say those things that make people so angry, not because I really mean them, but because I simply thought of a clever way to say them. It's a kind of art, to think of the perfect way to say an idea, and when you think of it then you have to say it, because words don't exist until you say them."
"A pretty feeble kind of art, Nyef, and I say you should give it up before it gets you killed.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, The Memory Of Earth (1992)

“I don’t know why he said that. Maybe he wanted to be in the paper? Maybe he doesn’t understand what I do? It’s bizarre to me that he says he doesn’t know who I am because he’s dressed me in the past. I’ve worn Karl Lagerfeld. Not even Chanel—his line. Lagerfeld doesn’t just send random things everywhere, so it was a big thing for me [to wear his label] to the CFDA Awards a few years ago. I don’t know how he missed that, when he dressed me that time. But you know, it’s cool. People can say whatever they want to say. You can’t please everybody, and you can’t live your life wanting to please everybody either.”

Heidi Klum (1973) German model, television host, businesswoman, fashion designer, television producer, and actress

Responding to Karl Lagerfeld's insult that Heidi Klum is unknown in the high fashion world. Quoted in Page Six Magazine, 10 September 2009 http://www.imnotobsessed.com/2009/09/08/heidi-klum-for-page-six-magazine.

“I don’t want you to agree with me; I want you to use your misplaced acorn of a brain before the squirrel comes looking for it again.”

Scott Lynch book Red Seas Under Red Skies

Last Reminiscence “By Their Own Rope” section 1 (p. 270)
Red Seas Under Red Skies (2007)

“She started walking again. "Are you saying you didn't even want to be with her? Not even just a little?"
He stopped. "How could I want to be with her when I want to be with you? I told you that before this whole thing started.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 1

“It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it. Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to π, or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number come out — without putting it in secretly!”

Richard Feynman book QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter

On the numerical value of α, the fine-structure constant, p. 129
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (1985)

“Our house is on fire. I am here to say, our house is on fire. […] Adults keep saying: “We owe it to the young people to give them hope.” But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act. I want you to act as you would in a crisis. I want you to act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”

Greta Thunberg book No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference

2019, World Economic Forum (January 2019)
Source: Greta Thunberg, 16, urges leaders to act on climate, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jan/25/our-house-is-on-fire-greta-thunberg16-urges-leaders-to-act-on-climate (25 January 2019)
Cited in ', Penguin Books, 2019, pages 19-24 (ISBN 9780141991740).

“I think this country allows you freedom of speech. Anybody should be allowed to say whatever they want. When you’re in my business, you can’t talk about [conservative] politics. You just can’t. You’re attacked viciously in a way that I’ve never been attacked before.”

Antonio Sabàto Jr. (1972) American actor and model

Antonio Sabato Jr. Says Hollywood is Blacklisting Him for Supporting Donald Trump http://variety.com/2016/film/news/antonio-sabato-jr-blacklisted-for-supporting-donald-trump-republican-1201829791/ (August 3, 2016)

“I have never thought for a moment that if you cannot say it with numbers that it just is not worth saying. But all the same, I do firmly believe that where you cannot put numbers to work you will understand the matter better and more clearly for being able to explain why.”

Nicholas Rescher (1928) American philosopher

Epistemetrics (2006), Preface

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

George Bernard Shaw 413

Related quotes

Related topics