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Thought
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Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself thinking once or twice a week.
-George Bernard Shaw
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It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Time
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Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Tragedy
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There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Travel
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Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Truth
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Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.
-George Bernard Shaw
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All great truths begin as blasphemies.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Unions
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No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn't actually fall down.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Unrequited Love
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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.
-George Bernard Shaw, An Unsocial Socialist (Chapter VII)
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Vegetarian
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A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Violence
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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.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Virtue
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Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
-George Bernard Shaw
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What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
-George Bernard Shaw
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Voting
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An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Wealth
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What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.
-George Bernard Shaw
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The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Wisdom
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The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Women
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The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Work
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Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.
-George Bernard Shaw
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When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn't want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work.
-George Bernard Shaw
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A man who has no office to go to -- I don't care who he is -- is a trial of which you can have no conception.
-George Bernard Shaw
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This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
-George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (Epistle Dedicatory To Arthur Bingham Walkley), 1903
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Youth
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Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
-George Bernard Shaw
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It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
-George Bernard Shaw
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Books by and about George Bernard Shaw