Showing posts with label Bernard Shaw. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bernard Shaw. Show all posts

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Guest Writer -- Thoughts and Style That Lasts.



Bernard Shaw


 There are a lot of anecdotes and quotations from Bernard Shaw, almost any of which provide a sufficient introduction to him.

Too much of what we see these days is not well-written, is fleeting, and transitory.  However, below, by way of introduction are a few anecdotes I have constructed from memory and then a bunch of collected quotes.  All of these quote are still germane today, while much of what is written today will be worthless and uninteresting in a week.

Once a young Shaw is reported to ask of a rather pretentius lady:  "Lady, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?"

"I would have to think about it, Mr. Shaw," she said, smiling.

"How about for one pound?"

"Indeed not!  What do you take me for?"

"Madam, we have already established that.  We are now merely haggling over the price."

****
Later on, after his fame and fortune had increased, an actress (Campbell or Terry, I think) asked "Mr. Shaw.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if we had a child and it had my looks and your brains?"

"Yes, but what a tragedy if it had my looks and your brains."

***
There are thousands of these, but one of my favorites came in a debate with his opponent (and respected one at that), G. K. Chesterton.  Shaw was very tall and very thin.  Chesterton was short and very portly. 

Chesterton attacked him on the subject for food for the poor:

"If people in other countries heard you, they would think there is a famine in England."

Shaw's instant retort was "And if they saw you, they'd know the reason for it."

***
And the one that sums up his attitude towards life is along these lines: Some people brought him some flowers when the heard he was ill.  He was in his early 90s at the time and refused them.

They were shocked and said "Why Mr. Shaw, we thought you LIKED flowers."

"I do.  I like children too, but I don't chop their heads off and stick them in pots around my house."

***
Finally, getting to society, an English Gentlewoman sent him a card with "Lady Throckmorton Holliday, Thursday, At home." (I'm not sure about the name.).

He wrote on the back, "George Bernard Shaw, Likewise."

****
Here are some stray quotes from his writings.  Next time, I will post an entire work worth printing out:
  • Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…
    • The World (15 November 1893)
  • Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it…
    • The World (18 July 1894), Music in London 1890-1894 being criticisms contributed week by week to The World (New York: Vienna House, 1973)
  • My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
    • Answers to Nine Questions (September 1896), answers to nine questions submitted by Clarence Rook, who had interviewed him in 1895.
  • We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
  • I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer.
    • Candida, Act III
  • We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.
  • The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.
    • You Never Can Tell, Act II
  • My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.
    • You Never Can Tell, Act IV
  • There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
    • Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, Vol. II, preface (1898)
  • Why should you call me to account for eating decently?
    • The Vegetarian (15 January 1898)
  • The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.
    • Three Plays for Puritans, Preface (1900)
  • The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
  • Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
    • The Devil's Disciple, Act II
  • You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
    • The Irrational Knot, Preface (1905)
  • [Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.
    • The Irrational Knot (1905)
  • To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist.
    • The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate (1908)
  • Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.
    • The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet (1909): The Rejected Statement, Pt. I : The Limits to Toleration
  • Why was I born with such contemporaries?
    • The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Preface (1910)
  • The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.
  • That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.
    • Fanny's First Play, Epilogue
  • As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
    • Overruled (1912)
  • Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.
    • Killing For Sport, Preface (1914)
  • All great truths begin as blasphemies.
    • Annajanska (1919)
  • You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
    • O'Flaherty V.C. (1919)
  • Scratch an Englishman and find a Protestant.
    • Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)
  • God is on the side of the big battalions.
    • Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)
  • Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
    • Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)
  • 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.
  • One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
    • The Apple Cart (1928), Act I
  • God help England if she had no Scots to think for her!
    • The Apple Cart (1928), Act II
  • 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.
    • The Intelligent Woman's Guide To Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism (1928)
  • 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.
    • Our Theatres In The Nineties (1930)
  • I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot.
  • An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.
    • Speech at New York (11 April 1933)
  • You in America should trust to that volcanic political instinct which I have divined in you.
    • Speech at New York (11 April 1933)
  • The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation.
    • letter, 24 June 1930, to Frank Harris "To Frank Harris on Sex in Biography" Sixteen Self Sketches (1949)
  • The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
    • "The Play of Ideas", New Statesman (6 May 1950)
  • The apparent multiplicity of Gods is bewildering at the first glance; but you presently discover that they are all the same one God in different aspects and functions and even sexes. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible Gods… Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the profoundest Methodist and the crudest idolater are equally at home in it.
    Islam is very different, being ferociously intolerant. What I may call Manifold Monotheism becomes in the minds of very simple folk an absurdly polytheistic idolatry, just as European peasants not only worship Saints and the Virgin as Gods, but will fight fanatically for their faith in the ugly little black doll who is the Virgin of their own Church against the black doll of the next village. When the Arabs had run this sort of idolatry to such extremes ... they did this without black dolls and worshipped any stone that looked funny, Mahomet rose up at the risk of his life and insulted the stones shockingly, declaring that there is only one God, Allah, the glorious, the great… And there was to be no nonsense about toleration. You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell. Mahomet was a great Protestant religious force, like George Fox or Wesley….
    There is actually a great Hindu sect, the Jains, with Temples of amazing magnificence, which abolish God, not on materialist atheist considerations, but as unspeakable and unknowable, transcending all human comprehension.
    • Letter to the Reverend Ensor Walters (1933), as quoted in Bernard Shaw : Collected Letters, 1926-1950 (1988) by Dan H. Laurence, p. 305; Shaw actually errs here in characterizing Jainism as simply a sect of Hinduism, as it is usually regarded as a separate and independent tradition, though Hindu and Jain philosophers have long had influence on each other, as well as other traditions.
  • I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capability to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. The world must doubtless attach high value to the predictions of great men like me. I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today. The medieval ecclesiastics, either through ignorance or bigotry, painted Muhammadanism in the darkest colours. They were in fact trained both to hate the man Muhammad and his religion. To them Muhammad was Anti-Christ. I have studied him — the wonderful man, and in my opinion far from being an Anti-Christ he must be called the Saviour of Humanity. I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much-needed peace and happiness. But to proceed, it was in the 19th century that honest thinkers like Carlyle, Goethe and Gibbon perceived intrinsic worth in the religion of Muhammad, and thus there was some change for the better in the European attitude towards Islam. But the Europe of the present century is far advanced. It is beginning to be enamoured of the creed of Muhammad.
  • I hold the Prophet of Arabia in great esteem and I can quite understand that it would have been impossible to restrain and wean that illiterate and perverse race, sunk in the miasma of utter moral depravity, from committing the most heinous of crimes, and imbue its people with enthusiasm to strive after righteousness and assimilate high morals and virtues, without projecting such a terrible and intensely awe inspiring spectacle of Hell and an equally captivating and enticing image of a land flowing with milk and honey to represent Heaven before their vision.
  • A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
    • Everybody's Political What's What (1944) Ch. 30
  • The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.
  • The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people.
  • Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.
    • As quoted in Bernard Shaw : The Lure of Fantasy (1991) by Michael Holroyd
  • The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
    • As quoted in Leadership Skills for Managers (2000) by Marlene Caroselli, p. 71


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