George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic and polemicist whose influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman, Pygmalionand Saint Joan. With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionPlaywright
Date of Birth26 July 1856
CityDublin, Ireland
CountryIreland
Power does not corrupt man; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power
People exaggerate the value of things they haven't got: everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with them
Better a leader of Fabianism than a chorus man in parliament.
Even the fact that doctors themselves die of the very diseases they profess to cure passes unnoticed. We do not shoot out our lips and shake our heads, saying, 'They save others: themselves they cannot save':
Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.
Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman; it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the human
Science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating ten more.
Science is always simple and profound. It is only half truths that are dangerous.
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius.
Common people do not pray; they only beg.
Common people do not pray, my lord: they only beg
Vice is waste of life. Poverty, obedience and celibacy are the canonical vices.
We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years, and justify our experience...on pain of liquidation.