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
Rebecca [West] can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely.
Nowadays a parlor maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective.
Life is a constant becoming: all stages lead to the beginning of others.
Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.
If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.
If you demand my authorities for this and that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority.
I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation.
I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.
Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.
Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.
A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.
The test to which all methods of treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to doctors or not.
The medical profession (is) a conspiracy to hide its own shortcomings. No doubt the same may be said of all professions. They are all conspiracies against the laity... (U)ntil there is a practicable alternative to blind trust in the doctor, the truth about the doctor is so terrible that we dare not face it.
Our prejudices are so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.