I remember reading Pygmalion (based on which My Fair Lady was made) when I was 15 and just got hooked to GBS! He is considered by many as the greatest English playwright after Shakespeare. Although he began as a music and literary critic, his main talent was for drama and he wrote more than 60 plays. Most of his writings addressed prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which made their rather grim themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.
Some biting gems from the great man!
* A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
* A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
* A man of great common sense and good taste – meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
* A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
* Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
* 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.
* Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.
* Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
* Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
* Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
* Better never than late.
* Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
* Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.
* Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
* Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
* 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.
Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.
* He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
Visual Courtesy:http://www.flickr.com/photos/38883044@N00/
