L. M. Shaw Quotes

New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.

An audience is in many respects no more than a mob under loose control.

You have no idea of the women I didn't marry.

And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.

Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous.

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all.

At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.

The good old days are neither better nor worse than the ones we're living through right now.

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.

Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.

Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.

An entrepreneur's life is always a continuous journey.

I care nothing for all the political parties in the world except as they stand for justice.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.

Last time I checked, lifting theory has a PR of zero.

All sorts of bodily diseases are produced by half-used minds.

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

Every Englishman believes that Handel now occupies an important position in heaven. If so, le bon Dieu must feel toward him very much as Louis Treize felt toward Richelieu.

History, sir, will tell lies as usual.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

An entertainer pleases others while an artist only has to please himself.

A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.

Somebody asked me once, 'Do you think that swing will ever come back?' And I said, 'Do you think the 1938 Ford will ever come back?'

Fond as we are of our loved ones, there comes at times during their absence an unexplained peace.

An artist should write for himself & not for an audience. If the audience likes it, great. If not, they can keep away.

Listening to Benny [Goodman] talk about the clarinet was like listening to a surgeon get hung up on a scalpel.

Today anything can be done - we have the techniques

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

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

The only sensible person is my tailor. He measures me anew each time he sees me.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

A family is a tyranny ruled over by it's weakest member.

We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself.

I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.

Trade unionism is not socialism. It is the capitalism of the proletariat.

The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!

Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head.

We educate one another; and we cannot do this if half of us consider the other half not good enough to talk to.

A succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I'm a free citizen.