H. W. Shaw Quotes

As 99 per cent of English authors and 100 per cent of American ones [authors] are just such imbeciles, managers and publishers make a practice of asking for every right the author possesses.

Stimulate the phagocytes.

HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man? DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

Every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up.

The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.

Of the two lots, the woman's lot of perpetual motherhood, and the man's of perpetual babyhood, I prefer the man's.

Why not give Christianity a trial?

O Lord! I don't know which is the worst of the country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do.

Whenever I see the word Operation, especially Trifling Operation, I at once write off the patient as dead.

You're only a beginner; and what you think is love, and interest, and all that, is not real love at all: three quarters of it is only unsatisfied curiosity.

Life's no brief candle-it's a splendid torch!

It is well to be off with the old woman before you're on with the new.

We have in England a curious belief in first-rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable second-rateness of the people we do know.

Oh, the frontier of hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

I love little children too but I don't cut off their heads and stick them in vases.

It is the inefficiency and sham of ... our schools ... that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance.

Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die.

Female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.

We must all share in the evils of the world or move to another planet.

A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

If you do not write for publication, there is little point in writing at all.

All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins?

It is clear that a novel cannot be too bad to be worth publishing. . . . It certainly is possible for a novel to be too good to be worth publishing.

You don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you? . . . If it's by a good author, it's a good play, naturally. That stands to reason.

Get married, but never to a man who is home all day.

Marriage is tolerable enough in its way if youre easygoing and dont expect too much from it. But it doesnt bear thinking about.

The politician who once had to learn to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.

If you say that God is good, great, blessed, wise or any such thing, the starting point is this : God is.

The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

I claim to be a conscientiously immoral writer.

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.

It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.

Unless the law of marriage were first made human, it could never become divine.

When I speak of The Case for Equality I mean human equality; and that, of course, can only mean one thing: it means equality of income.

Democracy means the organization of society for the benefit and at the expense of everybody indiscriminately and not for the benefit of a privileged class.

Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.

Men are always thinking that they are going to do something grandly wicked to their enemies; but when it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.

Blasphemy and sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State).

I can't control what life did to me, but I can control how I react. Therein lies the difference.

Once the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible, we crucified it.

The person who is ignorant enough to believe that his nourishment depends on meat is in a horrible dilemma.

Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words 'Remember that I too am mortal'.

There is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her elder sister; and that is her mother.

The Englishmen is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.

When you find something funny search it for hidden truth.

Youth, what a pity to waste it on the young.

The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.

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.

I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it.