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Even To This Day It Is Easier Than It Ought To Be For Me To Get A Rise Out Of An American By Telling Him Something About Himself Which Is Equally True About Every Human Being On The Face Of The Globe. He At Once Resents This As A Disparagement And An Assertion On My Part That People In Other Parts Of The Globe Are Not Like That, And Are Loftily Superior To Such Weaknesses.

-George Bernard Shaw

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Even To This Day

George Bernard Shaw

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Even To This Day It Is Easier Than It Ought To Be For Me To Get A Rise Out Of An American By Telling Him Something About Himself Which Is Equally True About Every Human Being On The Face Of The Globe. He At Once Resents This As A Disparagement And An Assertion On My Part That People In Other Parts Of The Globe Are Not Like That, And Are Loftily Superior To Such Weaknesses.

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Martyrdom Is The Only Path To Immortality That Requires No Talent Whatsoever.

My Opportunities Were Still There, Nay, They Multiplied Tenfold; But The Strength And Youth To Cope With Them Began To Fail, And To Need Eking Out With The Shifty Cunning Of Experience.

A Love Affair Should Always Be A Honeymoon. And The Only Way To Make Sure Of That Is To Keep Changing The Man; For The Same Man Can Never Keep It Up.

Women Are Not Angels. They Are As Foolish As Men In Many Ways; But They Have Had To Devote Themselves To Life Whilst Men Have Had To Devote Themselves To Death; And That Makes A Vital Difference In Male And Female Religion. Women Have Been Forced To Fear Whilst Men Have Been Forced To Dare: The Heroism Of A Woman Is To Nurse And Protect Life, And Of A Man To Destroy It And Court Death.

Somemenare Bornkings; And Someare Bornstatesmen. The Two Are Seldom The Same.

You Can Be A Thorough-going Neo-darwinian Without Imagination, Metaphysics, Poetry, Conscience, Or Decency. For 'natural Selection' Has No Moral Significance: It Deals With That Part Of Evolution Which Has No Purpose, No Intelligence, And Might More Appropriately Be Called Accidental Selection, Or Better Still, Unnatural Selection, Since Nothing Is More Unnatural Than An Accident. If It Could Be Proved That The Whole Universe Had Been Produced By Such Selection, Only Fools And Rascals Could Bear To Live.

When We Know What God Is, We Shall Be Gods Ourselves.

I Knew If I Waited Around Long Enough Something Like This Would Happen.

I No Longer Desire Happiness: Life Is Nobler Than That.

How You Ought Properly To Spell 'fish' In English: 'goti' .

I Dislike Feeling At Home When I Am Abroad.

I Object To Publishers: The One Service They Have Done Me Is To Teach Me To Do Without Them. They Combine Commercial Rascality With Artistic Touchiness And Pettishness, Without Being Either Good Business Men Or Fine Judges Of Literature.

Reminiscences Make One Feel So Deliciously Aged And Sad.

There Is The Eternal War Between Those Who Are In The World For What They Can Get Out Of It And Those Who Are In The World To Make It A Better Place For Everybody To Live In.

An Irishman's Imagination Never Lets Him Alone, Never Convinces Him, Never Satisfies Him; But It Makes Him That He Can't Face Reality Nor Deal With It Nor Handle It Nor Conquer It: He Can Only Sneer At Them That Do, And Be 'agreeable To Strangers', Like A Good-for-nothing Woman On The Streets.

Affection Between Adults - If They Are Really Adult In Mind And Not Merely Grown Up Children - And Creatures So Relatively Selfish And Cruel As Children Necessarily Are Without Knowing It Or Meaning It, Cannot Be Called Natural.

A Thing That Nobody Believes Cannot Be Proved Too Often.

Very Nice Sort Of Place, Oxford, I Should Think, For People That Like That Sort Of Place.

Democracy Substitutes Election By The Incompetent Many For Appointment By The Corrupt Few.

Democracies Have

The Nation's Morals Are Like Its Teeth: The More Decayed They Are The More It Hurts To Touch Them.

Ireland, Sir, For Good Or Evil, Is Like No Other Place Under Heaven, And No Man Can Touch Its Sod Or Breathe Its Air Without Becoming Better Or Worse.

Becoming Better

We Should Have Had Socialism Already, But For The Socialists, Am Quite Willing To Drop The Name If Dropping It Will Help Me To Get The Thing.

The First Prison I Ever Saw Had Inscribed On It Cease To Do Evil: Learn To Do Well; But As The Inscription Was On The Outside, The Prisoners Could Not Read It.

German And Spanish Are Accessible To Foreigners: English Is Not Accessible Even To Englishmen.

England And America Are Two Countries Separated By The Same Language.

It Is Not The Number Of Years We Have Behind Us, But The Number We Have Before Us, That Makes Us Careful And Responsible And Determined To Find Out The Truth About Everything.

Telling The Truth Is The Funniest Joke In The World.

Telling The Truth

Nothing Makes A Man So Selfish As Work.

I Do Not Want Actors And Actresses To Understand My Plays. That Is Not Necessary. If They Will Only Pronounce The Correct Sounds I Can Guarantee The Results.

My Religion? Well, My Dear, I Am A Millionaire. That Is My Religion.

I Must Have Been An Insufferable Child; All Children Are.

For Nearly Twenty Years I Have Been A Published Author... But I Have Never Yet Seen A Book Of Mine Offered For Sale In A Shop Window.

Most Of My Recent Plays Were Written In The Railway Train Between Hatfield And Kings Cross. I Write Anywhere, On The Top Of Omnibuses Or Wherever I May Be; It Is All The Same To Me.

Few Of Us Have Vitality Enough To Make Any Of Our Instincts Imperious.

The English Are Not A Very Spiritual People, So They Invented Cricket To Give Them Some Idea Of Eternity.

He Never Does A Proper Thing Without Giving An Improper Reason For It.

You Have Learnt Something. That Always Feels At First As If You Had Lost Something.

Of The Three Official Objects Of Our Prison System: Vengeance, Deterrence, And Reformation Of The Criminal, Only One Is Achieved; And That Is The One Which Is Nakedly Abominable.

Marriage Is Tolerable Enough In Its Way If Youre Easygoing And Dont Expect Too Much From It. But It Doesnt Bear Thinking About.

That Older And Greater Church To Which I Belong: The Church Where The Oftener You Laugh The Better, Because By Laughter Only Can You Destroy Evil Without Malice

I Dread Success. To Have Succeeded Is To Have Finished One's Business On Earth, Like The Male Spider Who Is Killed By The Female The Moment He Has Succeeded In His Courtship. I Like The State Of Continual Becoming, With A Goal In Front And Not Behind.

In An Ugly And Unhappy World The Richest Man Can Purchase Nothing But Ugliness And Unhappiness.

It Is A Woman's Business To Get Married As Soon As Possible, And A Man's To Keep Unmarried As Long As He Can.

The British Soldier Can Stand Up To Anything Except The British War Office.

British Soldiers

The First Condition Of Progress Is The Removal Of Censorship.

The Devil Can Quote Shakespeare For His Own Purpose.

In Your Salvation Shelter I Saw Poverty, Misery, Cold And Hunger. You Gave Them Bread And Treacle And Dreams Of Heaven. I Give From Thirty Shillings A Week To Twelve Thousand A Year. They Find Their Own Dreams; But I Look After The Drainage.

[chess] Is A Foolish Expedient For Making Idle People Believe They Are Doing Something Very Clever, When They Are Only Wasting Their Time.

Oh, The Frontier Of Hell And Heaven Is Only The Difference Between Two Ways Of Looking At Things.

It Is Nearly 50 Years Since I Was Assured By A Conclave Of Doctors That If I Did Not Eat Meat I Should Die Of Starvation.

Conceive. That Is The Word That Means Both The Beginning In Imagination And The End In Creation.

Never Forget That If You Leave Your Law To Judges And Your Religion To Bishops, You Will Presently Find Yourself Without Either Law Or Religion.

Finding Yourself

Vegetarians Claim To Be Immune From Most Diseases But They Have Been Known To Die From Time To Time.

Where There Is No Knowledge Ignorance Calls Itself Science.

All Government Is Cruel; For Nothing Is So Cruel As Impunity.

Capitalism Has Destroyed Our Belief In Any Effective Power But That Of Self Interest Backed By Force. But Even Capitalist Cynicism Will Admit That However Unconscionable We May Be When Our Own Interests Are Affected, We Can Be Most Indignantly Virtuous At The Expense Of Others.

If You Lived In London, Where The Whole System Is One Of False Good-fellowship, And You May Know A Man For Twenty Years Without Finding Out That He Hates You Like Poison, You Would Soon Have Your Eyes Opened. There We Do Unkind Things In A Kind Way: We Say Bitter Things In A Sweet Voice: We Always Give Our Friends Chloroform When We Tear Them To Pieces.

Few People Think More Than Two Or Three Times A Year; I Have Made An International Reputation For Myself By Thinking Once Or Twice A Week.

The Real Brahms Is Nothing More Than A Sentimental Voluptuary

If You Take Too Long In Deciding What To Do With Your Life, You'll Find You've Done It.

He Who Can, Does. He Who Cannot, Teaches.

I Believe In The Discipline Of Silence, And Could Talk For Hours About It.

A Vegetarian Is Not A Person Who Lives On Vegetables, Any More Than A Catholic Is A Person Who Lives On Cats.

Every Man Over Forty Is A Scoundrel.

In The Arts Of Life Main Invents Nothing; But In The Arts Of Death He Outdoes Nature Herself, And Produces By Chemistry And Machinery All The Slaughter Of Plague, Pestilence And Famine. ... There Is Nothing In Man's Industrial Machinery But His Greed And Sloth: His Heart Is In His Weapons.

Fine Art Is The Only Teacher Except Torture.

I Was A Cannibal For Twenty-five Years. For The Rest I Have Been A Vegetarian.

Compassion Is The Fellow-feeling Of The Unsound.

Of The Two Lots, The Woman's Lot Of Perpetual Motherhood, And The Man's Of Perpetual Babyhood, I Prefer The Man's.

We Must Always Think About Things, And We Must Think About Things As They Are, Not As They Are Said To Be.

Home Life Is No More Natural To Us Than A Cage Is Natural To A Cockatoo.

Optimistic Lies Have Such Immense Therapeutic Value That A Doctor Who Cannot Tell Them Convincingly Has Mistaken His Profession.

Our Way Of Getting An Army Able To Fight The German Army Is To Declare War On Germany Just As If We Had Such An Army, And Then Trust To The Appalling Resultant Peril And Disaster To Drive Us Into Wholesale Enlistment.

If You Must Hold Yourself Up To Your Children As An Object Lesson, Hold Yourself Up As A Warning And Not As An Example.

What We Are Confronted With Now Is A Growing Perception That If We Desire A Certain Type Of Civilization And Culture We Must Exterminate The Sort Of People Who Do Not Fit Into It.

The Anti-vivisector Does Not Deny That Physiologists Must Make Experiments And Even Take Chances With New Methods. He Says That They Must Not Seek Knowledge By Criminal Methods, Just As They Must Not Make Money By Criminal Methods. He Does Not Object To Galileo Dropping Cannon Balls From The Top Of The Leaning Tower Of Pisa; But He Would Object To Shoving Off Two Dogs Or American Tourists.

A Man Thinking Or Working Is Always Alone, Let Him Be Where He Will.

Independence? That's Middle Class Blasphemy. We Are All Dependent On One Another, Every Soul Of Us On Earth.

We Must Not Stay As We Are, Doing Always What Was Done Last Time, Or We Shall Stick In The Mud. Yet Neither Must We Undertake A New World As Catastrophic Utopians, And Wreck Our Civilization In Our Hurry To Mend It.

Imitation Is Not Just The Sincerest Form Of Flattery - It's The Sincerest Form Of Learning.

Hypocrisy ... Is Only Bad When It Is Improperly Used.

That Is What All Poets Do: They Talk To Themselves Out Loud; And The World Overhears Them. But It's Horribly Lonely Not To Hear Someone Else Talk Sometimes.

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.

What We Call Education And Culture Is For The Most Part Nothing But The Substitution Of Reading For Experience, Of Literature For Life, Of The Obsolete Fictitious For The Contemporary Real.

The Confusing Of Marriage With Morality Has Done More To Destroy The Conscience Of The Human Race Than Any Other Single Error.

All Great Truth First Starts As Blasphemy.

It's Not That I'm So Clever, It Is That Others Are So Stupid.

The American Constitution, One Of The Few Modern Political Documents Drawn Up By Men Who Were Forced By The Sternest Circumstances To Think Out What They Really Had To Face, Instead Of Chopping Logic In A University Classroom.

Shall I Turn Up The Light For You? No, Give Me Deeper Darkness. Money Is Not Made In The Light.

If You Do Not Say A Thing In An Irritating Way, You May As Well Not Say It At All Because People Will Not Trouble Themselves About Anything That Does Not Trouble Them.

Well, Sir, You Never Can Tell. That's A Principle In Life With Me, Sir, If You'll Excuse My Having Such A Thing.

The Man Who Writes About Himself And His Own Time Is The Only Man Who Writes About All People And About All Time.

Rebecca [west] Can Handle A Pen As Brilliantly As Ever I Could And Much More Savagely.

The Conversion Of A Savage To Christianity Is The Conversion Of Christianity To Savagery.

There Are No Secrets Better Kept Than The Secrets Everybody Guesses.

Keeping Secrets

Best Kept Secrets

Laws, Religions, Creeds, And Systems Of Ethics, Instead Of Making Society Better Than Its Best Unit, Make It Worse Than Its Average Unit, Because They Are Never Up To Date.

Even If Animal Experimentation Was Proved To Be Of Value, It Would Be Morally Wrong.

We Veneer Civilization By Doing Unkind Things In A Kind Way.

He Who Confuses Political Liberty With Freedom And Political Equality With Similarity Has Never Thought For Five Minutes About Either.

Syllables Govern The World.

In A Battle All You Need To Make You Fight Is A Little Hot Blood And The Knowledge That It's More Dangerous To Lose Than To Win.

When I Speak Of The Case For Equality I Mean Human Equality; And That, Of Course, Can Only Mean One Thing: It Means Equality Of Income.

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.

You Have To Choose Between Trusting To The Natural Stability Of Gold And The Natural Stability Of The Honesty And Intelligence Of The Members Of The Government. And, With Due Respect To These Gentlemen, I Advise You, As Long As The Capitalist System Lasts, To Vote For Gold.

An Author Who Gives A Manager Or Publisher Any Rights In His Work Except Those Immediately And Specifically Required For Its Publication Or Performance Is For Business Purposes An Imbecile.

Fine Art Is The Subtlest, The Most Seductive, The Most Effective Instrument Of Moral Propaganda In The World, Excepting Only The Example Of Personal Conduct; And I Waive Even This Exception In Favor Of The Art Of The Stage, Because It Works By Exhibiting Examples Of Personal Conduct Made Intelligible And Moving To Crowds Of Unobservant Unreflecting People To Whom Real Life Means Nothing.

You Don't Get Tired Of Muffins, But You Don't Find Inspiration In Them.

Activity Is The Only Road To Knowledge.

Those Who Admire Modern Civilization Usually Identify It With The Steam Engine And The Electric Telegraph.

It Is In The Hour Of Trial That A Man Finds His True Profession.

As To Spelling The Very Frequent Word Though With Six Letters Instead Of Two, It Is Impossible To Discuss It, As It Is Outside The Range Of Common Sanity. In Comparison Such A Monstrosity As Phlegm For Flem Is Merely Disgusting.

Build A System That Even A Fool Can Use, And Only A Fool Will Want To Use It.

Use It Or Lose It

No Question Is So Difficult To Answer As That To Which The Answer Is Obvious.

Questions And Answers

Problem Solving

Tradition Will Accustom People To Any Atrocity

Hegel Was Right When He Said That We Learn From History That Men Never Learn Anything From History.

Money Enables Us To Get What We Want Instead Of What Other People Think We Want.

An Idea That No One Believes Can Not Be Proved Too Often.

Live In Contact With Dreams And You Will Get Something Of Their Charm: Live In Contact With Facts And You Will Get Something Of Their Brutality. I Wish I Could Find A Country To Live In Where The Facts Were Not Brutal And The Dreams Not Real.

Rich Men Without Convictions Are More Dangerous In Modern Society Than Poor Women Without Chastity.

When God Created Man And Woman, He Did Not Take A Patent. That's Why Any Imbecile Has Been Able To Do So Ever Since.

A Man Of Great Common Sense And Good Taste - Meaning Thereby A Man Without Originality Or Moral Courage.

Man Is The Only Animal Of Which I Am Thoroughly And Cravenly Afraid...there Is No Harm In A Well-fed Lion. It Has No Ideals, No Sect, No Party.

Your Wits Can't Thicken In That Soft Moist Air, On Those White Springy Roads, In Those Misty Rushes And Brown Bogs, On Those Hillsides Of Granite Rocks And Magenta Heather. You've No Such Colours In The Sky, No Such Lure In The Distances, No Such Sadness In The Evenings. Oh The Dreaming! The Dreaming! The Torturing, Heart-scalding, Never Satisfying Dreaming, Dreaming, Dreaming, Dreaming!

It Is Long And Hard And Painful To Create Life: It Is Short And Easy To Steal The Life Others Have Made.

Make It A Rule Never To Give A Child A Book You Would Not Read Yourself.

When I Was Young, I Observed That Nine Out Of Ten Things I Did Were Failures. So I Did Ten Times More Work.

You Propound A Complicated Arithmetical Problem: Say Cubing A Number Containing Four Digits. Give Me A Slate And Half An Hour's Time, And I Can Produce A Wrong Answer.

Better Never Than Late.

As Well Consult A Butcher On The Value Of Vegetarianism As A Doctor On The Worth Of Vaccination.

Heaven, As Conventionally Conceived, Is A Place So Inane, So Dull, So Useless, So Miserable That Nobody Has Ever Ventured To Describe A Whole Day In Heaven, Though Plenty Of People Have Described A Day At The Seaside.

We Educate One Another; And We Cannot Do This If Half Of Us Consider The Other Half Not Good Enough To Talk To.

Not Good Enough

Is The Devil To Have All The Passions As Well As All The Good Tunes?

Never Waste Jealousy On A Real Man: It Is The Imaginary Man That Supplants Us All In The Long Run.

The Degree Of Tolerance Attainable At Any Moment Depends On The Strain Under Which Society Is Maintaining Its Cohesion.

If We Have Come To Think That The Nursery And The Kitchen Are The Natural Sphere Of A Woman, We Have Done So Exactly As English Children Come To Think That A Cage Is The Natural Sphere Of A Parrot: Because They Have Never Seen One Anywhere Else.

When The Military Man Approaches, The World Locks Up Its Spoons And Packs Off Its Womankind.

Whenever You Wish To Do Anything Against The Law, Cicely, Always Consult A Good Solicitor First.

If There Is Anything I Hate In A Woman, It's Want Of Character.

Every Man To Whom Salvation Is Offered Has An Inalienable Natural Right To Say 'no, Thank You: I Prefer To Retain My Full Moral Responsibility: It Is Not Good For Me To Be Able To Load A Scapegoat With My Sins: I Should Be Less Careful How I Committed Them If I Knew They Would Cost Me Nothing.

We Must All Share In The Evils Of The World Or Move To Another Planet.

A Man Without An Address Is A Vagabond; A Man With Two Addresses Is A Libertine.

I Become More Convinced That Beings From Other Planets Are Using The Earth As A Lunatic Asylum

Lunatic Asylums

Remember That The Progress Of The World Depends On Your Knowing Better Than Your Elders.

All Professions Are Conspiracies Against The Laity.

I Have Always Held The Religion Of Muhammad In High Estimation Because Of Its Wonderful Vitality. It Is The Only Religion Which Appears To Me To Possess That Assimilating Capability To The Changing Phase Of Existence Which Can Make Itself Appeal To Every Age... I Have Studied Him - The Wonderful Man, And In My Opinion Far From Being An Anti-christ He Must Be Called The Saviour Of Humanity.

The Real Brahms Is Nothing More Than A Sentimental Voluptuary. Rather Tiresomely Addicted To Dressing Himself Up As Handel Or Beethoven And Making A Prolonged And Intolerable Noise.

When I See That The Nineteenth Century Has Crowned The Idolatry Of Art With The Deification Of Love, So That Every Poet Is Supposed To Have Pierced To The Holy Of Holies When He Has Announced That Love Is The Supreme, Or The Enough, Or The All, I Feel That Art Was Safer In The Hands Of The Most Fanatical Of Cromwell's Major Generals Than It Will Be If Ever It Gets Into Mine.

You See Things And You Say, 'why?'. But I Dream Things And I Say, 'why Not?'.

Famous Inspirational

It Is Easy - Terribly Easy - To Shake A Man's Faith In Himself. To Take Advantage Of That To Break A Man's Spirit Is Devil's Work.

What Is Life But A Series Of Inspired Follies.

The Problem With The Press Is That They Can't Tell The Difference Between A Bicycle Crash And The End Of Civilization.

All Young Women Begin By Believing They Can Change And Reform The Men They Marry. They Can't.

Nature Holds No Brief For The Human Experiment; It Must Stand Or Fall By Its Results.

My Specialty Is Being Right When Other People Are Wrong.

During The Last Considerable Epidemic At The Turn Of The Century, I Was A Member Of The Health Committee Of London Borough Council, And I Learned How The Credit Of Vaccination Is Kept Up Statistically By Diagnosing All The Revaccinated Cases (of Smallpox) As Pustular Eczema, Varioloid Or What Not---except Smallpox.

What Is Both Surprising And Delightful Is That The Spectators Are Allowed, And Even Expected, To Join In The Vocal Part Of The Game...there Is No Reason Why The Field Should Not Try To Put The Batsman Off His Stroke At The Critical Moment By Neatly Timed Disparagements Of His Wife's Fidelity And His Mother's Respectability.

We All Go About Longing For Love: It Is The First Need Of Our Natures, The Loudest Cry Of Our Hearts.

I Am Of The Opinion That My Life Belongs To The Whole Community And As Long As I Live, It Is My Privilege To Do For It Whatever I Can.

Privilege And Responsibility

Even To This Day It Is Easier Than It Ought To Be For Me To Get A Rise Out Of An American By Telling Him Something About Himself Which Is Equally True About Every Human Being On The Face Of The Globe. He At Once Resents This As A Disparagement And An Assertion On My Part That People In Other Parts Of The Globe Are Not Like That, And Are Loftily Superior To Such Weaknesses.

Democracy Is A Device That Insures We Shall Be Governed No Better Than We Deserve.

The Love Of Economy Is The Root Of All Virtue.

And So, To The End Of History, Murder Shall Breed Murder, Always In The Name Of Right And Honor And Peace, Until The Gods Are Tired Of Blood And Create A Race That Can Understand.

An Englishman Thinks He Is Moral When He Is Only Uncomfortable.

I Learned Long Ago, Never To Wrestle With A Pig. You Get Dirty, And Besides, The Pig Likes It.

You Have No Right To Say That I Am Not Sincere. I Have Found A Happiness In Art That Real Life Has Never Given Me. I Am Intensely In Earnest About Art. There Is Is A Magic And Mystery In Art That You Know Nothing Of.

The Most Sincere Form Of Love Is Love For Food

A Man Of Genius Is Not A Man Who Sees More Than Other Men Do. On The Contrary, It Is Very Often Found That He Is Absentminded Andobserves Much Less Than Other People.... Why Is It That The Public Have Such An Exaggerated Respect For Him--after He Is Dead? The Reason Is That The Man Of Genius Understands The Importance Of The Few Things He Sees.

We All Have--to Put It As Nicely As I Can--our Lower Centres And Our Higher Centres. Our Lower Centres Act: They Act With Terriblepower That Sometimes Destroys Us; But They Don't Talk.... Since The War The Lower Centres Have Become Vocal. And The Effect Is That Of An Earthquake. For They Speak Truths That Have Never Been Spoken Before--truths That The Makers Of Our Domestic Institutions Have Tried To Ignore.

Imprisonment, As It Exists Today, Is A Worse Crime Than Any Of Those Committed By Its Victims.

Better Keep Yourself Clean And Bright; You Are The Window Through Which You Must See The World.

Those Who Understand The Steam Engine And The Electric Telegraph Spend Their Lives In Trying To Replace Them With Something Better.

Let Not The Right Side Of Your Brain Know What The Left Side Doeth.

I Don't Know If There Are Men On The Moon, But If There Are They Must Be Using The Earth As Their Lunatic Asylum

Lunatic Asylums

History, Sir, Will Tell Lies As Usual.

There May Be Some Doubt As To Who Are The Best People To Have Charge Of Children, But There Can Be No Doubt That Parents Are The Worst.

The Shot Irishmen Will Now Take Their Places Beside Emmet And The Manchester Martyrs In Ireland, And Beside The Heroes Of Poland And Sérbia And Belgium In Europe; And Nothing In Heaven Or Earth Can Prevent It.

Girls, Like Men, Want To Be Petted, Pitied, And Made Much Of, When They Are Diffident, In Low Spirits, Or In Unrequited Love. These Are Services Which The Weak Cannot Render To The Strong And Which The Strong Will Not Render To The Weak, Except When There Is Also A Difference Of Sex.

Two People Getting Together To Write A Book Is Like Three People Getting Together To Have A Baby. One Of Them Is Superfluous.

Marry Ann; And At The End Of A Week You'll Find No More Inspiration In Her Than In A Plate Of Muffins.

I Tell You That As Long As I Can Conceive Something Better Than Myself I Cannot Be Easy Unless I Am Striving To Bring It Into Existence Or Clearing The Way For It.

The Test Of Good Education Is Seeing How It Behaves In A Fight.

All Great Truths Begin As Blasphemies.

Newspaper : A Device Unable To Distinguish Between A Bicycle Accident And The Collapse Of Civilisation.

If You Injure Your Neighbour, Better Not Do It By Halves.

Kings Are Not Born: They Are Made By Artificial Hallucination.

The Englishmen Is At His Best On The Links And At His Worst In The Cabinet.

Not Until He Acquires European Manners Does The American Anarchist Become The Gentleman Who Assures You That People Cannot Be Mademoral By Act Of Parliament (the Truth Being That It Is Only By Acts Of Parliament That Men In Large Communities Can Be Made Moral, Even When They Want To).

Our Ideals, Like The Gods Of Old, Are Constantly Demanding Human Sacrifices.

An English Army Led By An Irish General: That Might Be A Match For A French Army Led By An Italian General.

English Is The Easiest Language To Speak Badly.

As People Get Their Opinions So Largely From The Newspapers They Read, The Corruption Of The Schools Would Not Matter So Much If The Press Were Free. But The Press Is Not Free. As It Costs At Least A Quarter Of A Million Of Money To Establish A Daily Newspaper In London, The Newspapers Are Owned By Rich Men. And They Depend On The Advertisements Of Other Rich Men. Editors And Journalists Who Express Opinions In Print That Are Opposed To The Interests Of The Rich Are Dismissed And Replaced By Subservient Ones.

When Two People Are Under The Influence Of The Most Violent, Most Insane, Most Delusive, And Most Transient Of Passions, They Are Required To Swear That They Will Remain In That Excited, Abnormal, And Exhausting Condition Continuously Until Death Do Them Part.

No Community Has Ever Yet Passed Beyond The Initial Phases In Which Its Pugnacity And Fanaticism Enabled It To Found A Nation, And Its Cupidity To Establish And Develop A Commercial Civilization.

That Is The Whole Secret Of Successful Fighting. Get Your Enemy At A Disadvantage; And Never, On Any Account, Fight Him On Equal Terms.

I've Posed Nude For A Photographer In The Manner Of Rodin's Thinker, But I Merely Looked Constipated.

To A Professional Critic (i Have Been One Myself) Theatre-going Is The Curse Of Adam. The Play Is The Evil He Is Paid To Endure In The Sweat Of His Brow; And The Sooner It Is Over, The Better.

It Is The Highest Creatures Who Take The Longest To Mature, And Are The Most Helpless During Their Immaturity.

Civilized Society Is One Huge Bourgeoisie: No Nobleman Dares Now Shock His Greengrocer.

When A Stupid Man Is Doing Something He Is Ashamed Of, He Always Declares That It Is His Duty.

Oh, Come! That Boot Is On The Other Leg. Why Should You Call Me To Account For Eating Decently? If I Battened On The Scorched Corpses Of Animals, You Might Well Ask Me Why I Did That

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