******************************************************************
Picture of George Bernard Shaw
******************************************************************
George Bernard Shaw was born on 26 July 1856, in Dublin. Shaw was an Irish dramatist, a freethinker, a supporter of women's rights and an advocate of equality of income as well. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, accepting the award but refusing the money.
Shaw's childhood was troubled. His father drank heavily, which made Shaw abstain from alocohol completely.In 1876 he went to London. Shaw did not return to Ireland for nearly thirty years.
Shaw began his literary career by writing music, theatre criticism and novels, with mixed success. In 1884 Shaw joined the Fabian Society, a middle-class socialist group, serving on its executive committee from 1885 to 1911. In 1895 Shaw became a drama critic for the Saturday Review.
In 1898 Shaw married the wealthy Charlotte Payne-Townshend. Shaw stayed with Charlotte until her death, although he was occasionally linked with other women.
Shaw's early plays, which attacked the evil's of capitalism and portrayed moral and social problems, were not well received. His first success was Arms and the Man(1894). Later more entertaining but equally principled plays like Candida and John Bull's Other Island (1904), fared better.
Pygmalion(1914) became the basis for two films and a musical,as My Fair Lady. Shaw's popularity declined after his essay "Common Sense About the War" which was considered unpatriotic. With Saint Joan (1923) he was again accepted by the post-war public.
Shaw died at Ayot St. Lawrence, Hertfordshire, November 2, 1950. Shaw wrote over 50 plays during his long life.
*****************************************************************
quotes
*****************************************************************
A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
*
A genius can't be forced; nor can you make an
ape an alderman.
*
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can
always depend on the support of Paul.
*
A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
*
A life spent making mistakes is not only more
honorable, but more useful than a life spent
doing nothing.
*
A man never tells you anything until you
contradict him.
*
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
*
Americans adore me and will go on adoring me
until I say something nice about them.
*
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
*
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only
uncomfortable.
*
Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my
friends.
*
Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
*
Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous
than ignorance.
*
Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear
other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
*
Clever and attractive women do not want to vote;
they are willing to let men govern as long as
they govern men.
*
Crude classifications and false generalizations
are the curse of organized life.
*
Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse,
and pretense of reluctance.
*
Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a
horizontal desire.
*
Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
*
England and America are two countries separated
by the same language.
*
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.
*
First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of
curiosity.
*
He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That
points clearly to a political career.
*
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
*
Hegel was right when he said that we learn from
history that man can never learn anything from history.
*
Hell is full of musical amateurs.
*
I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get
on in this world are the people who get up and look
for the circumstances they want, and if they can't
find them, make them.
*
I hate performers who debase great works of art;
I long for their annihilation.
*
I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig.
You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
*
I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
*
If parents would only realize how they bore their
children!
*
If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet,
you'd best teach it to dance.
*
Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are
all dependent on one another, every soul of us on
earth.
*
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
*
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men
dread it.
*
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any
more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
*
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between
one person and everybody else.
*
Most people do not pray; they only beg.
*
No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing,
and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
*
Only Lawyers and mental defectives are automatically
exempt for jury duty.
*
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world.
Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to
themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on
unreasonable people.
*
She had lost the art of conversation but not,
unfortunately, the power of speech.
*
Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of
things that never were and ask why not?
*
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced
to like what you get.
*
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the
financier.
*
The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is
not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
*
The power of accurate observation is commonly called
cynicism by those who have not got it.
*
The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they
behave in a quarrel.
*
The things most people want to know about are usually
none of their business.
*
There is only one religion, though there are a
hundred versions of it.
*
What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
*
What we call education and culture is for the most
part nothing but the substitution of reading for
experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete
fictitious for the contemporary real.
*
When a man says money can do anything, that settles
it: he hasn't got any.
*
When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten
things I did were failures. So I did ten times more
work.
*
The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he
took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while
all the rest went on with their old measurements and
expected them to fit me.
******************************************************************
