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!
