George Bernard Shaw on Knowledge

"You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself."

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

"The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it."

"Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think."

"I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough."

"He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career."

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

"You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something."

"One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't."

"I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On."

"The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them."

"The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing."

"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."

"I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them."

"Those who understand evil pardon it."

"You see, lots of the real people can't do it at all: they're such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. There's always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well."

"Until you have socialism you will never have State solidity, because, as we know, if you have private property you will immediately split your stake. You get the class conflict, the class struggle, the confrontation of interests between the proprietors and between the proletariat; and, therefore, you have something that is crumbling, that is divided against itself."

"Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary. You can talk to me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British officers; and yet you can't see the quintessential equality of all the religions."