Mystics

"The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place."

"The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech."

"The Bible is most dangerous book ever written on earth, keep it under lock and key."

"George Bernard Shaw is said to have told W.S.C.: Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend—if you have one. W.S.C. to G.B.S.: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second—if there is one."

"A: Would you sleep with me for $1,000,000? B: ...YES! A: How about $1? B: What do you think I am?"

"You can't make a man a Christian unless you first make him believe he is a sinner."

"In my view, Anglo-Irish history is for Englishmen to remember, for Irishmen to forget."

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

"Despite her failure, she persisted, and one day sent Shaw a card inviting him to tea. It read: “Lady X will be at home Thursday between 4 and 6” . . . Shaw sent it back with the comment: “Mr. Bernard Shaw likewise.”"

"You in America should trust to that volcanic political instinct which I have divined in you."

"An American has no sense of privacy. He doesn't know what it means. There is no such thing in the country."

"I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly tell our children that honesty is the best policy."

"I object to all punishment whatsoever. I don't want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people whom I want to kill. Not in any unkind or personal spirit. But it must be evident to all of you, you must all know half a dozen people at least, who are no use in this world; who are more trouble than they are worth. And I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board, just as he might come before the income tax commissioners, and say every 5 years or every 7 years, just put them there, and say, sir or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence; if you're not pulling your weight in the social boat; if you are not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can't be of very much use to yourself."

"Impression of Gandhi! You might as well ask one to give his impression of the Himalayas."

"I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot."

"No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means."

"It is far more likely that by the time nationalization has become the rule, and private enterprise the exception, Socialism (which is really rather a bad name for the business) will be spoken of, if at all, as a crazy religion held by a fanatical sect in that darkest of dark ages, the nineteenth century. Already, indeed, I am told that Socialism has had its day, and that the sooner we stop talking nonsense about it and set to work, like the practical people we are, to nationalize the coal mines and complete a national electrification scheme, the better. And I, who said forty years ago that we should have had Socialism already but for the Socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing. What I meant by my jibe at the Socialists of the eighteen-eighties was that nothing is ever done, and much is prevented, by people who do not realize that they cannot do everything at once."

"Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death."

"Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again, because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman's work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it."

"Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well."

"We have to confess it: Capitalist mankind in the lump is detestable. ...Both rich and poor are really hateful in themselves. For my part I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination. I pity the rich a little, but am equally bent on their extermination. The working classes, the ruling classes, the professional classes, the propertied classes, the ruling classes, are each more odious than the other: they have no right to live: I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves... And yet I am not in the least a misanthrope. I am a person of normal affections"

"We should refuse to tolerate poverty as a social institution not because the poor are the salt of the earth, but because 'the poor in a lump are bad'."

"God help England if she had no Scots to think for her!"

"I never resist temptation because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me."

"Breakages, Limited, the biggest industrial corporation in the country."

"What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?"

"One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who havnt and dont."

"Our natural dispositions may be good; but we have been badly brought up, and are full of anti-social personal ambitions and prejudices and snobberies. Had we not better teach our children to be better citizens than ourselves? We are not doing that at present. The Russians are. That is my last word. Think over it."

"Political necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes."

"Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?"

"God is on the side of the big battalions."

"Scratch an Englishman and find a Protestant."

"It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period."

"Well, of course, they notice you. You always hide just in the middle of the limelight."

"Socialists must be in favor of an aristocratic form of government. We must have the best men for the job . . . In the dictator you must have a man who has not only the power to govern but the force of character to impose himself as dictator whether you like him or not."

"[Mussolini was] farther to the Left in his political opinions than any of his socialist rivals."

"Some of the things Mussolini has done, and some that he is threatening to do go further in the direction of Socialism than the English Labour Party could yet venture if they were in power."

"The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy."

"The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it ... If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?"

"When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace."

"We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies."

"He must be greatly changed. Has he attained the seventh degree of concentration?"

"He [the British taxpayer] must be taught that war is not precise or economical. It is almost inconceivably wasteful and extravagant. It burns the house to roast the pig, and even then seldom roasts him effectively..... waste is the law of modern war; and nothing is cheap on the battlefield except the lives of men...... Therefore, my taxpayer, resign yourself to this: that we may fight bravely, fight hard, fight long, fight cunningly, fight recklessly, fight in a hundred and fifty ways, but we cannot fight cheaply."

"Howbeit, Paul succeeded in stealing the image of Christ crucified for the figure-head of his Salvationist vessel, with its Adam posing as the natural man, its doctrine of original sin, and its damnation avoidable only by faith in the sacrifice of the cross. In fact, no sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus."

"Revolutionary movements attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them."

"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic 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 of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life."

"Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth."

"I have to live for others and not for myself; that's middle-class morality."

"Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of."

"You see, lots of the real people can't do it at all: they're such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. There's always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well."