Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)
Context: It may come as a surprise to our technocrat philosophers, but people do not read, write, speak, or listen primarily for the purpose of achieving a test score. They use language in order to conduct their lives, and to control their lives, and to understand their lives. An improvement in one's language abilities is therefore... observed in changes in one's purposes, perceptions, and evaluations. Language education... may achieve what George Bernard Shaw asserted is the function of art. "Art," he said in Quintessence of Ibsenismn, "should refine our sense of character and conduct, of justice and sympathy, greatly heightening our self knowledge, self-control, precision of action and considerateness, and making us intolerant of baseness, cruelty, injustice, and intellectual superficialty and vulgarity." …For my purposes, if you replace the word "art" with the phrase "language education," you will have a precise statement of what I have been trying to say.
“If a farmer calls me to a sick animal, he couldn't care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.”
Source: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
“I don't believe in morality. I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw.”
Act III
1910s, The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)
"Bernard Shaw," in A Jacques Barzun Reader : Selections from his works (2002), p. 231
Source: The Confessions of Aleister Crowley (1929), Ch. 7.
Context: My mother was naturally a rather sensual type of woman and there is not doubt that sexual repression had driven her as nearly as possible to the borders of insanity.
My cousin Agnes had a house in Dorset Square. My mother took me to tea there one afternoon. A copy of Dr. Pascal was in the room. The word "Zola" caught my mother's eye and she made a verbal assault of hysterical fury upon her hostess. Both women shouted and screamed at each other simultaneously, amid floods of tears. Needless to say, my mother had never read a line of Zola — the name was simply a red rag to a cow.
This inconsistency, by the way, seems universal. I have known a printer object to set up "We gave them hell and Tommy", while passing unquestioned all sorts of things to which exception could quite reasonably be taken by narrow-minden imbeciles. The censor habitually passes what I, who am no puritan, consider nauseating filth, while refusing to license Oedipus Rex, which we are compelled to assimilate at school. The country is flooded with the nasty pornography of women writers, while there is an outcry against epoch-making masterpieces of philosophy like Jurgen. The salacious musical comedy goes its libidinous way rejoicing, while Ibsen and Bernard Shaw are on the black list. The fact is, of course, that the puritan has been turned by sexual repression into a sexual pervert and degenerate, so that he is insane on the subject.
Version given in Irrepressible Churchill: A Treasury of Winston Churchill’s Wit by Kay Halle, 1966
Apocryphal, originally featured Noël Coward and Randolph Churchill (Winston’s son); attested 1946 (columnist Walter Winchell, attributed to anonymous United Press journalist in London). Originally only featured first half about lack of friend; second half (retort about lack of second performance) attested 1948, as was replacement of personages by George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill. Specific plays added in later variants, ranging from Man and Superman (1903) to Saint Joan (1923), and appeared in biographies and quote collections from the 1960s.
The quote is presumably apocryphal due to earliest attestations being too different, less famous personages (easily replaced by more famous ones), the quotation becoming more elaborate in later versions, the 20+ year gap between putative utterance and first attestation, and the approximately 50 year gap between putative utterance and appearance in reference works, all as undocumented hearsay.
Detailed discussion at “ Here are Two Tickets for the Opening of My Play. Bring a Friend—If You Have One http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/25/two-tickets-shaw/”, Garson O’Toole, Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/, March 25, 2012.
Misattributed
Version given in Irrepressible Churchill: A Treasury of Winston Churchill’s Wit by Kay Halle, 1966
Apocryphal, from 1946. See discussion at Winston Churchill#Misattributed, and detailed discussion at “ Here are Two Tickets for the Opening of My Play. Bring a Friend—If You Have One http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/03/25/two-tickets-shaw/”, Garson O’Toole, Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/, (March 25, 2012)
Misattributed
In the The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952) Saroyan additionally wrote of Shaw:
He was a gentle, delicate, kind, little man who had established a pose, and then lived it so steadily and effectively that the pose had become real. Like myself, his nature has been obviously a deeply troubled one in the beginning. He had been a man who had seen the futility, meaninglessness and sorrow of life but had permitted himself to thrust aside these feelings and to perform another George Bernard Shaw, which is art and proper.
Hello Out There (1941)
