250 I'm afraid, Mr. Goldwyn, that we shall not ever be able to do business together. You see, you're an artist, and care only about art, while I'm only a tradesman and care only about money.
251 If you don't begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you are a red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!
252 Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you.
253 "Do you know what a pessimist is?" "A man who thinks everybody as nasty as himself, and hates himself for it."
254 When a man of normal habits is ill, everyone hastens to assure him that he is going to recover. When a vegetarian is ill (which fortunately very seldom happens), everyone assures him that he is going to die, and that they told him so, and that it serves him right. They implore him to take at least a little gravy, so as to give himself a chance of lasting out the night.
255
The test of a man's or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel. Anybody can behave well when things are going smoothly.
256 Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.
257 To make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy. To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy.
258 There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
259 Man may have his opinion as to the relative importance of feeding his body and nourishing his soul, but he is allowed by Nature to have no opinion whatever as to the need for feeding the body before the soul can think of anything but the body's hunger.
260 What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
261 He poses as Jefferson Davis to please the Disruptionists. He ... poses as Lincoln to please the Unionists.... Why does he not visit America, and learn the cult of the man who can look his fellow man (or newspaper) in the eye, and tell him to go to hell?
262 Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.
263 Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you can't blame them for that, can you?
264 When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
265 He hates chess. He says it is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something clever when they are only wasting their time.
266 Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
267 Not bloody likely.
268 The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
269 Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.
270 If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all.
271 The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.
272 What is laisser-faire but an orthodoxy? The most tyrannous and disastrous of all the orthodoxies, since it forbids you even to learn.
273 Swindon: What will History say? Burgoyne: History, sir, will tell lies, as usual.
274 It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
275 Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.
276 The danger of crippling thought, the danger of obstructing the formation of the public mind by specially suppressing ... representations is far greater than any real danger that there is from such representations.
277 If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.
278 Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
279 Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma.
280 It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
281 Even under the most perfect Social Democracy we should, without Communism, still be living like hogs, except that each hog would get his fair share of grub.... Whilst we are hogs, let us at least be well-fed, healthy, reciprocally useful hogs, instead of—well, instead of the sort we are at present.
282 What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say "I know" instead of "I am learning," and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for scepticism and activity.
283 The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
284 The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.
285 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.
286 Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.
287 We were trying to find out a sound plan of distributing money; and every time we proposed to distribute it according to personal merit or achievement or dignity or individual quality of any sort the plan reduced itself to absurdity. When we tried to establish a relation between money and character we were beaten. When we tried to establish a relation between money and the dignity that gives authority we were beaten. And when we gave it up as a bad job and thought of leaving things as they are we found that they would not stay as they are.... The only way out of this is to give everybody the same, which is the Socialist solution of the distribution problem.
288 The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.
289 It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
290 The function of comedy is to dispel ... unconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysis right on to it.
291 I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
292 My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
293 Fine art is the only teacher except torture.
294 There is something in you that I respect, and that makes me desire to have you for my enemy.
295 As long as atomic bomb manufacture remains a trade secret known to only one State, it will be the mainstay of Peace because all the States (including this one) will be afraid of it. When the secret is out atomic warfare will be barred as poison gas was in 1938-45; and war will be possible as before.
296 No child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor.
297 Trade Unionism is not Socialism: it is the Capitalism of the Proletariat.
298 No doubt Jews are most obnoxious creatures. Any competent historian or psychoanalyst can bring a mass of incontrovertible evidence to prove that it would have been better for the world if the Jews had never existed. But I, as an Irishman, can, with patriotic relish, demonstrate the same of the English. Also of the Irish.... We all live in glass houses. Is it wise to throw stones at the Jews? Is it wise to throw stones at all?
299
Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.
300 As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
301 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.
302 The ordinary man—we have to face it: it is every bit as true of the ordinary Englishman as of the ordinary American—is an Anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed.
303 The one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man.
304 O Lord! I don't know which is the worst of the country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do.
305 The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.
306 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 terrible power 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.
307 The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.
308 An interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personal importance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed.
309 A man of great common sense and good taste—meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
310 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.
311 If there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It's in the nature of governments to tell lies.
312 Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
313 Lady Utterword: What a lovely night! It seems made for us. Hector: The night takes no interest in us. What are we to the night?
314 Always strive to find out what to do by thinking, without asking anybody. If you continually do this, you will soon act like a grown-up woman. For want of doing this, a very great number of grown-up people act like children.
315 Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
316 The war shook down the Tsardom, an unspeakable abomination, and made an end of the new German Empire and the old Apostolic Austrian one. It ... gave votes and seats in Parliament to women.... But if society can be reformed only by the accidental results of horrible catastrophes ... what hope is there for mankind in them? The war was a horror and everybody is the worse for it.
317 It will do you no good if I get over this. A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.
318 As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.
319 The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are "not for an age, but for all time" has his reward in being unreadable in all ages.... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only sort of man who writes about all people and about all time.
320 The great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience. He has to interpret life.
321 The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.
322 You think that you are Ann's suitor; that you are the pursuer and she the pursued; that it is your part to woo, to persuade, to prevail, to overcome. Fool: it is you who are the pursued, the marked down quarry, the destined prey.
323 I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.
324 All problems are finally scientific problems.
325 Give a man health and a course to steer; and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.
326 Really, Barbara, you go on as if religion were a pleasant subject. Do have some sense of propriety.
327 It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
328 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.
329 I won the battle the wrong way when our worthy Russian generals were losing it the right way.
330 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.
331 He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
332 An Irishman's heart is nothing but his imagination.
333 I, who have preached and pamphleteered like any Encyclopedist, have to confess that my methods are of no use, and would be no use if I were Voltaire, Rousseau, Bentham, Marx, Mill, Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin, Butler, and Morris all rolled into one, with Euripides, More, Montaigne, Molière, Baumarchais, Swift, Goethe, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Jesus, and the prophets all thrown in (as indeed in some sort I am, standing as I do on all their shoulders). The problem being to make heroes out of cowards, we paper apostles and artist-magicians have succeeded only in giving cowards all the sensations of heroes whilst they tolerate every abomination, accept every plunder, and submit to every oppression.
334 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 and observes 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.
335 Worst of all, there is no sign of any relaxation of antisemitism. Logically it has nothing to do with Fascism. But the human race is imitative rather than logical; and as Fascism spreads antisemitism spreads.
336 Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.
337 There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
338 You said that my manner in that book was not serious enough—that I made people laugh in my most earnest moments. But why should I not? Why should humor and laughter be excommunicated? Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?
339 Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
340 Defeatism is the wretchedest of policies.
341 Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.
342 The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
343 A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
344 A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
345 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.
346 I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them "You are supreme: exercise your power." They say, "That's right: tell us what to do;" and I tell them. I say "Exercise your vote intelligently by voting for me." And they do. That's democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.
347 The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
348 My first childish doubt as to whether God could really be a good Protestant was suggested by my observation of the deplorable fact that the best voices available for combination with my mother's in the works of the great composers had been unaccountably vouchsafed to Roman Catholics.
349 What is laisser-faire but an orthodoxy? The most tyrannous and disastrous of all the orthodoxies, since it forbids you even to learn.
350 My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I am a free citizen.
351 You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
352 Pickering: Have you no morals, man? Doolittle: Can't afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.
353 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.
354 A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else.
355 In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
356 Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.
357 Paradoxes are the only truths.
358 I'm not a teacher: only a fellow-traveller of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead—ahead of myself as well as you.
359 With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespear when I measure my mind against his.... But I am bound to add that I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespear. He has outlasted thousands of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more.
360 Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.
361 One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
362 It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.
363 The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.
364 He said that private practice in medicine ought to be put down by law. When I asked him why, he said that private doctors were ignorant licensed murders.
365 There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
366 Whatever is contrary to established manners and customs is immoral. An immoral act or doctrine is not necessarily a sinful one: on the contrary, every advance in thought and conduct is by definition immoral until it has converted the majority. For this reason it is of the most enormous importance that immorality should be protected jealously against the attacks of those who have no standard except the standard of custom, and who regard any attack on custom—that is, on morals—as an attack on society, on religion, and on virtue.
367 Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parents.
368 All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies.
369 We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!
370 You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
371 Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.
372 What is the historical function of Parliament in this country? It is to prevent the Government from governing.
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