P.K. Shaw Quotes

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

[...] any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.

A vegetarian is not a person who lives on vegetables, any more than a Catholic is a person who lives on cats.

Spend all you have before you die, and do not outlive yourself.

All Artists are Anarchists.

How you ought properly to spell 'fish' in English: 'goti' .

An actress is not a lady; at least, when she is, she is not an actress.

If ever I utter an oath again may my soul be blasted to eternal damnation!

Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks.

It is not true that men can be divided into absolutely honest persons and absolutely dishonest ones. Our honesty varies with the strain put on it.

The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.

Only where there is pecuniary equality can the distinction of merit stand out.

Defeatism is the wretchedest of policies.

I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short- a gentlemanly gas deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel.

The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it

A man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her.

There are scores of thousands of human insects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the Will of God on every possible subject

Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.

Most married couples spend the whole day apart, the woman in the house, the man in the office or study or workshop.

To make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy. To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy.

Bible worship, though at its best it may achieve sublimity by keeping its head in the skies, may also make itself both ridiculousand dangerous by having its feet off the ground.

My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt.

The only power a god can teach is the power of doing without happiness.

Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place.

Let wife and child perish, and lay bricks for your last crust, rather than part with an iota of your [copy]rights.

Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment.

Remember always that the least plain sister is the family beauty.

The problem with the press is that they can't tell the difference between a bicycle crash and the end of civilization.

Medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common cure-mongering witchcraft

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination.

Stop being Jews and start being human beings.

The philosopher is Nature's pilot.

First really like is just a little bit foolishness as well as a lot of curiosity. No actually self-respecting girl would reap the benefits of it.

Make me a beautiful word for doing things tomorrow; for that surely is a great and blessed invention.

My heart, my heart, be whole and free: Love is thine only enemy.

You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.

I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.

The pianoforte is the most important of all musical instruments; its invention was to music what the invention of printing was to poetry.

Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.

Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.

Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted?

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself.

Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.

A man's behaviour may be quite harmless and even beneficial, when he ismorally behaving like a scoundrel. And he may do great harm when he is morally acting on the highest principles.

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

Vitality is a woman is a blind fury of creation.

Somemenare bornkings; and someare bornstatesmen. The two are seldom the same.

No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.

Your father is a fool skin deep; but you are a fool to your very marrow.