George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His 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 (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). 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.

Quotes

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.
Democracy: The substitution of election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.
If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, they wouldn't reach any conclusion.
The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.
We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Hunting
What is virtue but the trades unionism of the married.
Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
It took me twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public.
The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

Youth
Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols, or bombs without incurring any penalties.
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.
Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence...on pain of liquidation.
I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.
Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.

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