L. M. Shaw Quotes

I do serve on various boards and I'm very honest and frank, obviously, I am a very forthright person and I do, sort of, share my candid views on anything.

Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.

Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance.

The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn't care if they repeated themselves.

Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.

If football players were armed with guns, there wouldn't be stadiums large enough to hold the crowds.

People who light up like Roman candles come down in the dark very quickly.

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

What God hath joined together no man shall put asunder: God will take care of that.

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a person's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.

Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or religion.

No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn't actually fall down.

Woman's happiness begins with her first love and ends about then

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.

Take the utmost care to get well born and well brought up.

Englishmen never will be slaves; they are free to do whatever the government and public opinion allow them.

Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

A modern gentleman [rich person] is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner.

Money is a most important thing in the world.

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

Hate is the revenge of a coward intimidated.

I have my own soul. My own spark of divine fire.

Woman reduces us all to the common denominator.

I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.

An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country.

Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

I do not want to make my stomach a graveyard of dead animals.

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.

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.

Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries.

And by endlessly sanitizing our feelings, we actually feed a disgruntled nation.

Oh, come! That boot is on the other leg. Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

An Englishman does everything on principle: he fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

I like to quote myself frequently and often, it makes me sound much more intelligent than I actually am.

English is the easiest language to speak badly.

A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.

It is not pleasure that makes life worth living. It is life that makes pleasure worth having.

My reputation grows with every failure.

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it.

In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.