George Bernard Shaw

“ REASON The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her. DECENCY Decency is Indecency’s Conspiracy of Silence. EXPERIENCE Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men. ”

“ THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN The fatal reservation of the gentleman is that he sacrifices everything to his honor except his gentility. A gentleman of our days is one who has money enough to do what every fool would do if he could afford it: that is, consume without producing. The true diagnostic of modern gentility is parasitism. No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism. A modern gentleman is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner. ”

“ The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires. Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death. Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men. ”

“ Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better. The imagination cannot conceive a viler criminal than he who should build another London like the present one, nor a greater benefactor than he who should destroy it. ”

“ LIBERTY AND EQUALITY He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either. Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free. Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. ”

“ When the wooden idol does not answer the peasant’s prayer, he beats it: when the flesh and blood idol does not satisfy the civilized man, he cuts its head off. He who slays a king and he who dies for him are alike idolaters. ”

“ Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science. If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the God of rascals. If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience! ”

“ Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination, because there it is invested with the approval of society. It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law. When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. ”

“ In moments of progress the noble succeed, because things are going their way: in moments of decadence the base succeed for the same reason: hence the world is never without the exhilaration of contemporary success. ”

“ THE UNCONSCIOUS SELF The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it. Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does. ”

“ SELF-SACRIFICE Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing. If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself. ”

“ The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater. Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells. The most anxious man in a prison is the governor. It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system. ”

“ FAIRPLAY The love of fairplay is a spectator’s virtue, not a principal’s. GREATNESS Greatness is only one of the sensations of littleness. In heaven an angel is nobody in particular. Greatness is the secular name for Divinity: both mean simply what lies beyond us. If a great man could make us understand him, we should hang him. ”

“ The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols. The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood. A limited monarchy is a device for combining the inertia of a wooden idol with the credibility of a flesh and blood one. ”

“ The relation of master and servant is advantageous only to masters who do not scruple to abuse their authority, and to servants who do not scruple to abuse their trust. The perfect servant, when his master makes humane advances to him, feels that his existence is threatened, and hastens to change his place. Masters and servants are both tyrannical; but the masters are the more dependent of the two. A man enjoys what he uses, not what his servants use. Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites. ”

“ The modern sentimental term for the national minimum of celibacy is Purity. Marriage, or any other form of promiscuous amoristic monogamy, is fatal to large States because it puts its ban on the deliberate breeding of man as a political animal. ”

“ A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education. The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent’s first duty. The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child’s character. ”

“ The Court is the servant’s hall of the sovereign. Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation. The flunkeyism propagated by the throne is the price we pay for its political convenience. DEMOCRACY If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved. Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. Democratic republics can no more dispense with national idols than monarchies with public functionaries. ”

“ The essential function of marriage is the continuance of the race, as stated in the Book of Common Prayer. The accidental function of marriage is the gratification of the amoristic sentiment of mankind. The artificial sterilization of marriage makes it possible for marriage to fulfil its accidental function whilst neglecting its essential one. The most revolutionary invention of the XIX century was the artificial sterilization of marriage. Any marriage system which condemns a majority of the population to celibacy will be violently wrecked on the pretext that it outrages morality. ”

“ Activity is the only road to knowledge. Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation. No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another. ”

“ Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes. He who gives money he has not earned is generous with other people’s labor. Every genuinely benevolent person loathes almsgiving and mendicity. ”

“ The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone. Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination. Equality is fundamental in every department of social organization. The relation of superior to inferior excludes good manners. EDUCATION When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman. ”

“ IMPERIALISM Excess of insularity makes a Briton an Imperialist. Excess of local self-assertion makes a colonist an Imperialist. A colonial Imperialist is one who raises colonial troops, equips a colonial squadron, claims a Federal Parliament sending its measures to the Throne instead of to the Colonial Office, and, being finally brought by this means into insoluble conflict with the insular British Imperialist, “cuts the painter” and breaks up the Empire. ”

“ The tyranny that forbids you to make the road with pick and shovel is worse than that which prevents you from lolling along it in a carriage and pair. In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness. ”

“ The North American Indian was a type of the sportsman warrior gentleman. The Periclean Athenian was a type of the intellectually and artistically cultivated gentleman. Both were political failures. The modern gentleman, without the hardihood of the one or the culture of the other, has the appetite of both put together. He will not succeed where they failed. He who believes in education, criminal law, and sport, needs only property to make him a perfect modern gentleman. MODERATION Moderation is never applauded for its own sake. ”

“ The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man. The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes. ”

“ MARRIAGE Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. ”

“ No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespear. ”

“ Great men refuse titles because they are jealous of them. HONOR There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones. You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it. ”

“ GAMBLING The most popular method of distributing wealth is the method of the roulette table. The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown. Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is why the bishops dare not denounce it fundamentally. THE SOCIAL QUESTION Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty: what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness. ”

“ In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will. BEAUTY AND HAPPINESS, ART AND RICHES Happiness and Beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of Happiness and Beauty. Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty. He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it. ”

“ Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it. ”

“ HOW TO BEAT CHILDREN If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven. ”

“ WOMEN IN THE HOME Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse. ”

“ Polygamy, when tried under modern democratic conditions, as by the Mormons, is wrecked by the revolt of the mass of inferior men who are condemned to celibacy by it; for the maternal instinct leads a woman to prefer a tenth share in a first rate man to the exclusive possession of a third rate one. ”

“ RELIGION Beware of the man whose god is in the skies. What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts. VIRTUES AND VICES No specific virtue or vice in a man implies the existence of any other specific virtue or vice in him, however closely the imagination may associate them. ”

“ The Chinese tame fowls by clipping their wings, and women by deforming their feet. A petticoat round the ankles serves equally well. Political Economy and Social Economy are amusing intellectual games; but Vital Economy is the Philosopher Stone. ”

“ WOMEN IN THE HOME Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse. CIVILIZATION Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material. Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph. ”

“ No man dares say so much of what he thinks as to appear to himself an extremist. Mens sana in corpore sano is a foolish saying. The sound body is a product of the sound mind. Decadence can find agents only when it wears the mask of progress. ”

“ Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination. ”