eugenics

"Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
– George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950]

sounds reasonable

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

- George Bernard Shaw

massacre the idle, the unfit

I "appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. Deadly by all means, but humane not cruel."
- George Bernard Shaw, 1934

"Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable."
- George Bernard Shaw

sounds reasonable

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

- George Bernard Shaw

How memoirs took over the literary world

"All autobiographies are lies," said Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw. A look at the rise of the memoir here.

professionals

Nathaniel Hawthorne[1804-1864]

"In fact, the more you look, the more reasons writers give for being writers. Many writers say that they become writers because they simply could not do anything else. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: 'I don't want to be a doctor, and live by men's diseases; nor a minister to live by their sins; nor a lawyer to live by their quarrels. So I don't see there's anything left for me but to be an author.' T.S. Eliot, who had been a boxer in college, noted: 'I was too slow a mover. It was much easier to be a poet.' And George Bernard Shaw pointed out a practical advantage of the writing life that still holds true: 'My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.'"

- Alice W. Flaherty, The Midnight Disease, pg. 214

Superman

"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."

- George Bernard Shaw [1856-1950] won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925

In the 1890s, Shaw renounced Atheism. He began identifying himself as a mystic. Some people believe Shaw was strongly influenced by Hinduism. Throughout the rest of his life, Shaw espoused a belief system that in 2004 Gary Sloan called "an idiosyncratic version of Henri Bergson's creative evolution." His self-described mystic beliefs focused on the evolution of humanity and other organisms, driven by a mysterious "life force."

In [Shaw's] "Shawianity", god was a work in progress, not a fait accompli. In a 1909 letter to Leo Tolstoy [1828-1910], Shaw explained: "To me God does not yet exist; but there is a creative force struggling to evolve an executive organ of godlike knowledge and power; that is, to achieve omnipotence and omniscience; and every man and woman born is a fresh attempt to achieve this object. We are here to help God, to do his work, to remedy his whole errors, to strive towards Godhead ourselves." In its odyssey to achieve fruition, the life force would create ever-higher forms of humanity--supermen, super-supermen, supermen to the third power: "When one instrument is worn out, I will make another, and another, and another, always more and more intelligent and effective."

Source here.

"You have learnt something. That always feels at first as though you had lost something."
- George Bernard Shaw character 'Andrew Undershaft', in Act III of "Major Barbara"