A Shavian Collection

You invite Shaw down to your place because you think he will
entertain your friends with brilliant conversation.  But before you know
where you are he has chosen a school for your son, made your will for
you, regulated your diet and assumed all the privileges of your family
solicitor, your housekeeper, your clergyman, your doctor and your
dressmaker.  When he has finished with everyone else he incites the
children to rebellion.  And when he can find nothing more to do he goes
away and forgets all about you. -anonymous hostess, quoted Bennet Cerf, _Shake Well Before Using_, 1948

  Shaw, one day you will eat a pork chop, and then God help all women.
  --Mrs. Pat Campbell

  I really only enjoy his stage directions; the dialogue is vortical and
, I find, fatiguing.  It is like being harangued.  He uses the English
language like a truncheon.
  --Max Beerbohm, quoted S. N. Behrens, _Conversations with Max_, 1960

  He is a good man fallen among Fabians.
  --Lenin

  I remember coming across him at the Grand Canyon and finding him
peevish and refusing to admire it or even look at it properly.  He was
jealous of it.
  --J. B. Priestley, _Thoughts in the Wilderness_

  His brain is a half-inch layer of champagne poured over a bucket of
Methodist near-beer.
  --Benjamin de Casseres

  At 83 Shaw's mind was perhaps not quite as good as it used to be, but
it was still better than anyone else's.
  --Alexander Woollcott, _While Rome Burns_, 1934

  The way Bernard Shaw believes in himself is very refreshing in these
atheistic days when so many believe in no God at all.
  --Israel Zangwill

A life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable
but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
     --George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
      _The Doctor's Dilemma_ [1913]

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always
depend on the support of Paul.
     --George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
      _Everybody's Political What's What_ [1944], Chapter 30

I am a millionaire.  That is my religion.
     --George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
      _Major Barbara_ [1905], Act II

People are always blaming their circumstances for
what they are.  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.
     --George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
      _Mrs. Warren's Profession_ [1893], Act II

He who can, does.  He who cannot, teaches.
>>>     --George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
>>>      _Man and Superman_ [1903], "Maxims: Education"

>'Those _teach_ who can't _do_' runs the dictum,
>But for some even that's out of reach:
>They can't even teach -- so they've picked 'em
>To teach other people to teach.
>     -- Ted Pauker, "A Grouchy Good Night to the Academic Year"

Reviewers are usually people who would have been
poets, historians, biographers, etc., if they could;
they have tried their talents at one or the other,
and have failed; therefore they turn critics.
     --Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
      _Lectures on Shakespeare and Milton_ [1811-1812]
The whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins
and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.
     --George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
      _Man and Superman_ [1903]

It’s his tendentiousness, I think, that keeps him trivial. He’s always out to solve social problems—the sure sign of a superficial practitioner.
-- Thomas Berger, letter to Zhulfikar Ghose, 1975

The allurement that women hold out to men is
precisely the allurement that Cape Hatteras holds
out to sailors: they are enormously dangerous and
hence enormously fascinating.
     --H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
      _The Smart Set_ [1919], "The Incomparable Buzz-Saw"

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to
hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the
essence of inhumanity.
     --George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
      _The Devil's Disciple_ [1901], Act 2