First Principle: Have a point and make it by means of the best word.
Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.
The world has long observed that small acts of immorality, if repeated, will destroy character. It is equally manifest, though never said, that uttering nonsense and half-truth without cease ends by destroying Intellect.
The test and the use of man’s education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind.
Finding oneself was a misnomer; a self is not found but made.
The truth is, when all is said and done, one does not teach a subject, one teaches a student how to learn it.
If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.
Great cultural changes begin in affectation and end in routine.
The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.
The mind tends to run along the groove of one’s intention and overlook the actual expression.
Of course, clothing fashions have always been impractical, except in Tahiti.
Bad writing, it is easily verified, has never kept scholarship from being published.
Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.
We may complain and cavil at the anarchy which is the amateurs natural element, but in soberness we must agree that if the amateur did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.
Like Rousseau, whom he resembles even more than he resembles Voltaire, Shaw never gave a social form to his assertiveness, never desired to arrive and to assimilate himself, or wield authority as of right.
Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.
Grab a pen and put down some words – your name even – and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way.
We cannot appreciate the art of any age without first acquiring an equivalent of the experience it depicts.
The philosophical implication of race-thinking is that by offering us the mystery of heredity as an explanation, it diverts our attention from the social and intellectual factors that make up personality.
To watch a football game is to be in a prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you’re seeing. It’s more like an emergency happening at a distance than a game. I don’t wonder the spectators take to drink.