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Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.

George Bernard Shaw

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George Bernard Shaw
Age: 94 †
Born: 1856
Born: July 26
Died: 1950
Died: November 2
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Dublin city
Bernard Shaw
G.B. Shaw
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In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win.
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Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.
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When the horrors of anarchy force us to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts content.
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Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
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Whenever an obviously well founded statement is made in England by a person specially well acquainted with the facts, that unlucky person is instantly and frantically contradicted by all the people who obviously know nothing about it.
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Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.
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People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.
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A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
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Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die.
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No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.
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Be as romantic as you please about love ... but you mustn't be romantic about money.
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Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.
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If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
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The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.
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You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.
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Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity, except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition.
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