Misattributed To Shaw Quotes

The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society - and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding. ~ William H. Whyte

It was more fun trying to figure out I Want To Hold Your Hand than to take lessons. By this time I knew basic chords. ~ Tommy Shaw

I'm not the kind of guy who deserves to play a vintage guitar because I'm too rough on instruments. ~ Tommy Shaw

In actual fact, however, the revolt of Ibsen and Shaw against the conventional nineteenth century drama could very well be described as a return to Shakespeare, as an attempt once again to present human beings in their historical and social setting and not, as playwrights since the Restoration had done, either as wholly private or as embodiments of the social manners of a tiny class. Shakespeare's plays, it is true, are not, in the Shavian sense, "dramas of thought," that is to say, not one of his characters is an intellectual: it is true, as Shaw says, that, when stripped of their wonderful diction, the philosophical and moral views expressed by his characters are commonplaces, but the number of people in any generation or society whose thoughts are not commonplace is very small indeed. On the other hand, there is hardly one of his plays which does not provide unending food for thought, if one cares to think about it. ~ W. H. Auden

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. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measuresby results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself. ~ George Bernard Shaw

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul. ~ George Bernard Shaw

All progress is due to the unreasonable person. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Everything is energy and that's all there is to it. Match the frequency of the reality you want and you cannot help but get that reality. It can be no other way. This is not philosophy. This is physics. ~ Darryl Anka

To devise an information processing system capable of getting along on its own - it must handle its own problems of programming, bookkeeping, communication and coordination with its users. It must appear to its users as a single, integrated personality. ~ Cliff Shaw

The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators. ~ George Bernard Shaw

A man who desires to get married should know everything or nothing. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. If all economists were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero ... I tell you, gentlemen, if you can shew a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally. ~ George Bernard Shaw

There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I stare at her above me and want her to pry me open, to crack my ribs, lick my heart, break my bones and suck out the marrow. I want to live inside of her. ~ Michelle Hodkin

My grandmother is still a woman who worries about what she looks like when she goes outside. She's from that era, and I can remember saying to her, 'Grandmother, we're just going to the grocery store.' And she'd be like, 'I've got to fix my face!' You were very aware of how you were presenting yourself to society in 1960s Las Vegas. ~ Vinessa Shaw

Too Much to Ask
It seemed too much to ask of one small virgin that she should stake shame against the will of God. All she had to hold to, later, were those soft, inward flutterings and the remembered surprise of a brief encounter - spirit with flesh. Who would think it more than a dream wish? An implausible, laughable defense.
And ~ Luci Shaw

A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men. ~ George Bernard Shaw

There's nothing really difficult if you only begin - some people contemplate a task until it looms so big, it seems impossible, but I just begin and it gets done somehow. There would be no coral islands if the first bug sat down and began to wonder how the job was to be done. ~ John Shaw Billings

I twisted my arm to curl him behind me and he unfolded there, the two of us snuggled like quotation marks in his room full of words. ~ Michelle Hodkin

The sex illusion is not a fixed quantity: not what mathematicians call a constant. It varies from zero in my wife's case to madness in that of our stepsister. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Holy isn't always a church or open meadow. It can be a zone of profound change, where sexuality, the mythic realms, dreams, and the opening of soul can all occur. Those sculptural images on the temple walls are telling us this, warning us of major potencies at play. If you want to keep everything just so, nice and white, go no further. ~ Martin Shaw

Demodox folliculorum has eight stumpy legs and a tail, is about a third of millimeter long, and loves nothing more than to recline in the warm, oily pits of your hair follicles. Most adults have this mite, usually on the head and especially in eyelashes, and often in nipples. ~ Karl Shaw

A local white bootlegger, idling under the store awning, accosted Major Stem. "Why'd you call that damned nigger woman 'Mrs. Shaw'?" he demanded. In those days, white Southerners did not use courtesy titles for their black neighbors. While it was permissible to call a favored black man "Uncle" or "Professor" - a mixture of affection and mockery - he must never hear the words "mister" or "sir." Black women were "girls" until they were old enough to be called "auntie," but they could never hear a white person, regardless of age, address them as "Mrs." or "Miss" or "Ma'am." But Major Stem made his own rules. ~ Timothy B. Tyson

Somewhere in the distance I hear the bucket clatter to the floor. I plunge the knife into his head, again and again. His arms lash out blindly, getting in the way. Blood mixes with water cascading to the floor. Meathead staggers to his feet, pulling off his shirt, trying to peel away the agony, but his skin comes away with it, leaving a raw, red mess.

There's a shrill alarm and the sound of pounding feet. I hurl the knife through the bars at the window. A blur of dark faces converge in my vision, fists and feet, punching and kicking. Meathead's mates are yanking me off, trying to hurt me. Screws come rushing and soon they're everywhere as I'm half-carried, half-dragged along the corridor.

'Blimey,' a thought comes from somewhere in all the chaos, 'I've only been out a day and already I'm heading straight back down the chokey!' The last thing I see, as a screaming Meathead is hurried to the hospital, is my cellmate in the middle of the crowd peering worriedly after me. Course he's worried! The stinky bastard is wondering where his next bit of scag is coming from! ~ Harry Shaw

Money is the counter that enables life to be lived socially; it is life as truly as sovereigns and banknotes are money. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I'm always yours, Rule. I will so totally marry you and it would make me happier than anything in the entire world to be an Archer. I don't need a ring or a speech. All I ever need is you. ~ Jay Crownover

If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Apart front the things you can pick up ( the dressing and the proper way of speaking and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me like a lady and always will. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Charles. Oh, your voices, your voices. Why don't the voices come to me? I am king, not you!

Joan. They do come to you, but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the angelus rings, you cross yourself and have done with it. But if you prayed from your heart and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air after they stopped ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I admit at the beginning that 'popular religion,' 'demotic religion,' the pieties of the common folk, tends to sink to the lowest common denominator, be it in syncretizing saints with old, half-forgotten pagan godlings, or in preferring the nasal whine and the revivalist shoutin' to solid sense and learning, regarding intellect as positively inimical to the workings of the Holy Ghost. But it is in American religious life, especially Protestant American religious life, that things bottom out completely. ~ Markham Shaw Pyle

if u want to be happy ...be ~ G.B. Shaw

I guess I was very fortunate; I had a very very, lets put it this way, I had very wonderful upbringing and a childhood where my parents, of course, exposed us to many cultural aspects, not only of India but other parts of the world. ~ Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

The Seven Social Sins are:

Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.


From a sermon given by Frederick Lewis Donaldson in Westminster Abbey, London, on March 20, 1925. ~ Frederick Lewis Donaldson

It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture. ~ George Bernard Shaw

When a prisoner sees the door of his dungeon open, he dashes for it without stopping to think where he shall get his dinner outside. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better. ~ George Bernard Shaw

To the person with a toothache, even if the world is tottering, there is nothing more important than a visit to a dentist. ~ George Bernard Shaw