It's the birthday of playwright George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin, Ireland (1856). His most famous play is Pygmalion (1913), about a cockney girl who learns to pass as a lady. It was the basis for the musical My Fair Lady (1956). As a young man, he moved to London from Dublin with his mother, who was a music teacher. She made enough money for the two of them to live on, so Shaw could devote himself to writing. He spent his days reading at the library and writing novels that no one would publish. He got into politics in his twenties, fighting for the rights of the working poor, but he was always terrified that public demonstrations would turn violent.
Shaw wrote his first play, Widowers' Houses (1892), about the evils of slumlords. The play was viciously attacked by people who opposed his politics, and Shaw figured that he must be a good playwright if he could make people so angry. He revolutionized English theater by writing plays about ideas when most other playwrights were writing sentimental melodramas. He wrote dozens of plays, including Man and Superman (1905) and Saint Joan (1923).
He was an obsessive letter writer and wrote about a quarter of a million letters in his lifetime, averaging nine letters a day, every day, for seventy-five years. He had an opinion about everything, and eventually became more famous for his personality than for his writing.
Shaw said, "Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week."
*A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman.
*A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
*A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
*A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
*A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.
*Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
*An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country.
*Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
*Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
*England and America are two countries separated by a common language.
*Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
*Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
*Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich--something for nothing.
*Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
*Hell is full of musical amateurs.
*I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
*I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
*If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
*If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
*If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a footrule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
*If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
*Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
*Lack of money is the root of all evil.
*Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
*Martyrdom is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
*Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
*Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.
*Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
*The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
*The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed but that he cannot believe anyone else.
*And he said, "Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
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