Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man’s will and his environment: in a word, of problem.
An interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personalimportance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed.
O Lord! I don’t know which is the worst of the country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do.
The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.
In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.
Whenever I see the word Operation, especially Trifling Operation, I at once write off the patient as dead.
You’re only a beginner; and what you think is love, and interest, and all that, is not real love at all: three quarters of it is only unsatisfied curiosity.
Only where there is pecuniary equality can the distinction of merit stand out.
If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else.
If you don’t begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you area red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!
Defeatism is the wretchedest of policies.
I can’t control what life did to me, but I can control how I react. Therein lies the difference.
The chief objection to playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player.
My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child’s soul through the dirt.
Once the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible, we crucified it.
The person who is ignorant enough to believe that his nourishment depends on meat is in a horrible dilemma.
There is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her elder sister; and that is her mother.
You don’t get tired of muffins, but you don’t find inspiration in them.
The Englishmen is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.
Fear is choosing the safe course.