“These childish evasions are revolting. We must strip off the whitewash and find out what is really beneath it. Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.”
Preface; Extermination
Ignoring the satirical elements of Shaw's rhetoric, and that he is presenting many arguments of sometimes questionable sincerity for the "humane" execution of criminals, the last sentence here has sometimes been misquoted as if it as part of an argument for exterminations for the sake of eugenics, by preceding it with a selected portion of a statement later in the essay: "If we desire a certain type of civilization, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it … Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly".
1930s, On the Rocks (1933)
Context: In this play a reference is made by a Chief of Police to the political necessity for killing people: a necessity so distressing to the statesmen and so terrifying to the common citizen that nobody except myself (as far as I know) has ventured to examine it directly on its own merits, although every Government is obliged to practise it on a scale varying from the execution of a single murderer to the slaughter of millions of quite innocent persons. Whilst assenting to these proceedings, and even acclaiming and celebrating them, we dare not tell ourselves what we are doing or why we are doing it; and so we call it justice or capital punishment or our duty to king and country or any other convenient verbal whitewash for what we instinctively recoil from as from a dirty job. These childish evasions are revolting. We must strip off the whitewash and find out what is really beneath it. Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.
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George Bernard Shaw 413
Irish playwright 1856–1950Related quotes
Guardian Camwar, in Ch. 4 : the cooper<!-- p. 42 -->
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On 29 August 1944 during a private conversation with other officers at Trent Park. Randall Hansen says that the veracity of Choltitz's involvement in such massacres is uncertain but that it is possible, even probable, that Choltitz was one of the many German generals who did commit atrocities. Hansen goes on to say the quote was out of context and there has never been any corroborating evidence of Choltitz's involvement in the massacre of Jews.
Source: The Man in the High Castle (1962)
Context: When I was a child, I thought as a child. But now I have put away childish things.... I must be scientific.
Vol II, p. 216.
1940s, The Making Of Scientific Management, 1945
26 August 1941, p. 91
Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum, 1941-1943
Fors Clavigera, letter lxxvi (4 March 1877).
Fors Clavigera (1871-1878 and 1880-1884)
Niafer, in Book Ten : At Manuel's Tomb, Ch. LXIX : Economics of Jurgen
The Silver Stallion (1926)
