We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy, which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet if Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern in person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration, can at least recognize and appreciate capacity and benevolence in others, and so govern through capably benevolent representatives? Where are such voters to be found today? Nowhere.


Bernard Shaw

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GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle an...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
When we know what God is, we shall be gods ourselves.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drun...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, t...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three ...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Although I cannot lay an egg, I am a very good judge of omelettes
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lu...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inac...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
[H]e is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
All problems are finally scientific problems.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of con...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Animals are my friends...and I don't eat my friends.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend ... if you have one." GEORGE BERNARD SHAW You see things; you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. T...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyon...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Youth is wasted on the young.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid of.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceiv...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they wa...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The seven deadly sins... food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing c...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other c...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure witho...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be n hell is to drift: to b...
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW