Welcome to my weekly blog,  SATURDAY SESSIONS!

In this blog, for the perusal of all our students, past, present and future, I include an extract from our interactive presentation Course, Ireland and its Culture.

If you wish to ask me any question about the text, by the way, just send me an e-mail at greg@bluefeather.ie

Log Twenty-nine, GEORGE BERNARD SHAW (1856-1950)

          Born in Dublin, Shaw was another household name in Britain and Ireland in the early twentieth century.  He was widely admired  for his sharpness of intellect and his wit and he wrote some engaging plays such as PYGMALION (later filmed as My Fair Lady).

          The prefaces to his plays are often better than the plays themselves, but nevertheless, Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

          Like Wilde, he played a very important role in changing society through his plays. Victorian plays were usually sentimental and superficial. Shaw focused on the moral, political and economic issues of the time. Like Wilde, he was a superb essayist and a famous critic. 'My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.'

          Shaw was a committed  socialist and a vegetarian.  'Animals are my friends - and I don't eat my friends.'  He described schools as prisons, deadening to the spirit and stifling to the intellect.  'What we want to see is the child in pursuit of the knowledge, not the knowledge in pursuit of the child.'

          He was a member of a BBC radio panel set up to standardise the pronunciation of words in English - but the venture was a failure because the panellists could never agree!

          His political views, however (a fan of Stalin and Mussolini) and his appalling comments regarding eugenics and population control (not to mention his distasteful sense of self-importance), diminish his stature as a Nobel Laureate.

         

Some of Shaw's quotes:

1. Those who cannot change their minds, cannot change anything.

2. There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.

3. Why should we take advice on sex from the pope?  If he knows anything about it, he    shouldn't.

4. The liar's punishment is not that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

5. Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.

6. 'I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend...if you have one.'  (Shaw to Churchill)   'Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second...if there is one.' (Churchill to Shaw)

7. The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

8. Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

9. War does not decide who is right but who is left.

10. He knows nothing, and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

11. Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

12. You don't stop laughing when you grow old; you grow old when you stop laughing.

13. The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

14. Youth is wasted on the young.

15. If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.

P.S. Fintan O'Toole has just published a magnificently-produced book on Shaw; it would make a great Christmas present for anyone who's interested!