17 George Bernard Shaw Quotes on Culture

George Bernard Shaw quotes on culture

11. The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.

26. Scratch an Englishman and find a Protestant.

30. God help England if she had no Scots to think for her!

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

43. THEODOTUS. Caesar: you are a stranger here, and not conversant with our laws. The kings and queens of Egypt may not marry except with their own royal blood. Ptolemy and Cleopatra are born king and consort just as they are born brother and sister. BRITANNUS (shocked). Caesar: this is not proper. THEODOTUS (outraged). How! CAESAR (recovering his self-possession). Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.

46. '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.'

78. At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven. A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven.

107. An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

164. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

165. The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

189. The extermination of what the exterminators call inferior races is as old as history. 'Stone dead hath no fellow' said Cromwell when he tried to exterminate the Irish. 'The only good nigger is a dead nigger' say the Americans of the Ku-Klux temperament. 'Hates any man the thing he would not kill?' said Shylock naively. But we white men, as we absurdly call ourselves in spite of the testimony of our looking glasses, regard all differently colored folk as inferior species. Ladies and gentlemen class rebellious laborers with vermin. The Dominicans, the watchdogs of God, regarded the Albigenses as the enemies of God, just as Torquemada regarded the Jews as the murderers of God. All that is an old story: what we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it. There is a difference between the shooting at sight of aboriginal natives in the back blocks of Australia and the massacres of aristocrats in the terror which followed the foreign attacks on the French Revolution. The Australian gunman pots the aboriginal natives to satisfy his personal antipathy to a black man with uncut hair. But nobody in the French Republic had this feeling about Lavoisier, nor can any German Nazi have felt that way about Einstein. Yet Lavoisier was guillotined; and Einstein has had to fly for his life from Germany. It was silly to say that the Republic had no use for chemists; and no Nazi has stultified his party to the extent of saying that the new National Socialist Fascist State in Germany has no use for mathematician-physicists. The proposition is that aristocrats (Lavoisier's class) and Jews (Einstein's race) are unfit to enjoy the privilege of living in a modern society founded on definite principles of social welfare as distinguished from the old promiscuous aggregations crudely policed by chiefs who had no notion of social criticism and no time to invent it.

197. Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.[2]

201. America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between

217. If any religion had the chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.[4]

227. The customs of your tribe are not laws of nature.

228. The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creator's hand.

233. The ordinary Britisher imagines that God is an Englishman