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George Bernard Shaw
242 quotes
“Until you have socialism you will never have State solidity, because, as we know, if you have private property you will immediately split your stake. You get the class conflict, the class struggle, the confrontation of interests between the proprietors and between the proletariat; and, therefore, you have something that is crumbling, that is divided against itself.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From a lecture before the Fabian Society in London called "The Politics of Unpolitical Animals" (23 November 1933), as cited in "Shaw Heaps Praise upon the Dictators: While Parliaments Get Nowhere, He Says, Mussolini an…
“As a red hot Communist I am in favour of fascism. The only drawback to Sir Oswald's movement is that it is not quite British enough.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From "The Blackshirt Challenge", News Chronicle (17 January 1934), as cited in Gareth Griffith Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw, Routledge (1993) p. 264.
“Mussolini, Kemal, Pilsudski, Hitler and the rest can all depend on me to judge them by their ability to deliver the goods and not by... comfortable notions of freedom. Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago; and I take off my hat to him accordingly.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion", G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 47. Also reported in Political Pilgrams: Western Intellectuals in Se…
“I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short, a gentlemanly gas – deadly by all means, but humane not cruel.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Listener (BBC magazine) (February 1934)
“Now take Stalin himself. He is 'neither duke nor peer', not a king, not a chancellor, not a dictator, not a Prime Minister, not an archbishop, not entitled to salutes enforced by youths in coloured shirts, but simply secretary of the supreme controlling organ of the hierarchy, subject to dismissal at five minutes' notice if he does not give satisfaction. This position he has attained through the survival of the fittest, and has held through the years of the most appalling vicissitudes that ever attended the birth pangs of a new civilisation.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion", G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 40
“Stalin has exiled Trotsky and become the Pontifex Maximus of the new Russo-Catholic Church of Communism on two grounds. First, he is a practical Nationalist statesman recognizing that Russia is a big enough handful for mortal rulers to tackle without taking on the rest of the world as well.... Second, Stalin, inflexible as to his final aim, is a compete opportunist as to the means.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion", G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., The New Statesman and Nation (1934) p. 26
“The Italians must allow us to slaughter the Momands, because, if we do not kill the warlike hillmen, they will kill us. And we must allow the Italians to slaughter the Danakils for the same reason.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: About Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, in Gareth Griffith, Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw (1993), p. 267
“Then the first man who had the gumption to see that we might get up on our legs and defy all those old treaties, he would be the most popular man in England. There can be no peace in the world until there is peace between England, France, Germany, Russia, the United States and all the big powers of the West. Now take that home and think about it and don't be frightened any more about the Germans.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: About the Treaty of Versailles (1935). George Bernard Shaw Speaks on Hitler and Germany 1935 (video)
“Dear Katharine Cornell: I don't think I was ever so astonished by a picture as I was by your photograph. Your success as Candida and something blonde and expansive about your name had created an ideal British Candida in my imagination. Fancy my feelings on seeing the photograph of a gorgeous dark lady from the cradle of the human race ... wherever that was ... Ceylon ... Sumatra ... Hilo ... or the southernmost corner of the Garden of Eden. If you look like that it doesn't matter a rap if you can act or not. Can you? Yours, breath bereaved, Bernard Shaw.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to , c. 1936; as quoted in , Leading Lady: The World and Theatre of Katharine Cornell (1978), p. 187
“We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable, but insisting that they should do it as humanely as they can afford to, and not shock civilization by such misdemeanors as the expulsion and robbery of Einstein.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From a letter to Beatrice Webb (1938), as cited in Dan H. Laurence (ed) Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1926-1950, New York: Viking (1988), p. 493
“The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1930 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: letter, 24 June 1930, to Frank Harris "To Frank Harris on Sex in Biography" Sixteen Self Sketches (1949)
“The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1950 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Play of Ideas", New Statesman (6 May 1950)
“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Everybody's Political What's What (1944), Ch. 30, p. 256
“We have no reason to suppose that we are the Creator's last word.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Everybody's Political What's What (1944)
“I am a communist, but not a member of the Communist Party. Stalin is a first rate Fabian. I am one of the founders of Fabianism and as such very friendly to Russia.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1807 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in the Evening Herald in Dublin, Ireland (February 3, 1948), reprinted in Economic Council Letter, Issue 278, Part 397 (1952), p. 1807
“The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Days with Bernard Shaw (1949) by Stephen Winsten
“The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Days with Bernard Shaw (1949) by Stephen Winsten
“Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in Bernard Shaw: The Lure of Fantasy (1991) by Michael Holroyd
“The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it ; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to English Prisons Under Local Government by Sydney and Beatrice Webb (1922)
“Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1888 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to London music in 1888-89 as heard by Corno di Bassetto (1937)
“The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence (1931)
“I know I began as a passion and have ended as a habit, like all husbands.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, Act 2 (1934)
“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted in Hesketh Pearson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality (1942)
“Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. Creeds, articles, and institutes of religious faith ossify our brains and make change impossible. As such they are nuisances, and in practice have to be mostly ignored.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Everybody's Political What's What? (ebook, must be borrowed) (1944), Chapter XXXVII: Creed and Conduct, p. 330
“The old Whigs and new Tories of the school of Cobden and Bright, the "Philosophic Radicals," the economists of whom Bastiat is the type, Lord Wemyss and Lord Bramwell, Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Auberon Herbert, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Leonard Courtney: any of these is, in England, a more typical Anarchist than Bakounin. They distrust State action, and are jealous advocates of the prerogative of the individual, proposing to restrict the one and to extend the other as far as is humanly possible, in opposition to the Social-Democrat, who proposes to democratize the State and throw upon it the whole work of organizing the national industry, thereby making it the most vital organ in the social body.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1891 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 'The Impossibilities of Anarchism', a paper read to the Fabian Society on 16 October 1891, reprinted in The Impossibilities of Anarchism (Fabian tract no. 45, 1895), pp. 4–5
“Die Walküre is endured by the average man because it contains four scenes for which he would sit out a Scotch sermon, or even a House of Commons debate. These are the love duet in the first act, Brunnhilde's announcement of death in the second, the ride of the Valkyries and the 'fire-charm' in the third. For them the ordinary playgoer endures hours of Wotan, with Christopher Sly's prayer in his heart. 'Would 'twere over!' Now, I am one of those elect souls who are deeply moved by Wotan. I grant you that as a long-winded, one-eyed gentleman backing a certain champion in a fight and henpecked out of his fancy because his wife objects to the moral character of the champion, he is a dreary person indeed . . . but to one who has understood all its beauties, its lofty aspirations, its tragedy, there is nothing trivial, nothing tedious in Die Walküre.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1896 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Comments after attending the 1896 Bayreuth Festival. Quoted in Carolyn Abbatte, ["Visits to Valhalla: The Ectasy And the Agony", The New York Times (March 26, 1989)
“I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self. In the case of a work which is a mere exhibition of skill in conventional art, there may be some excuse for the delusion that the longer the artist works on it the nearer he will bring it to perfection. Yet even the victims of this delusion must see that there is an age limit to the process, and that though a man of forty-five may improve the workmanship of a man of thirty-five, it does not follow that a man of fifty-five can do the same. When we come to creative art, to the living word of a man delivering a message to his own time, it is clear that any attempt to alter this later on is simply fraud and forgery. As I read the old Quintessence of Ibsenism I may find things that I see now at a different angle, or correlate with so many things then unnoted by me that they take on a different aspect. But though this may be a reason for writing another book, it is not a reason for altering an existing one.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1913 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Preface to the 1913 edition
“Again, there is the illusion of "increased command over Nature," meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man's increased command over Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make ... lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cusins: Call you poverty a crime? Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and thinking it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into disastrous anarchical action. Because our marriage law is inhuman and unreasonable to the point of downright abomination, the bolder and more rebellious spirits form illicit unions, defiantly sending cards round to their friends announcing what they have done. Young women come to me and ask me whether I think they ought to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with; and they are perplexed and astonished when I, who am supposed (heaven knows why!) to have the most advanced views attainable on the subject, urge them on no account to compromise themselves without the security of an authentic wedding ring.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every hour. Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of liberty.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor's flowerbeds and plant your own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary. You can talk to me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British officers; and yet you can't see the quintessential equality of all the religions.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants. ... Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1913 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Literary Censorship in England" in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5 (November 1913), p. 378; this has sometimes appeared on the internet in paraphrased form as "Censorship ends in logical completeness when …
“A nation should always be healthily rebellious; but the king or prime minister has yet to be found who will make trouble by cultivating that side of the national spirit. A child should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself more and more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and conduct; yet as nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppish child, it is useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcate this uppishness. Such unamiable precepts as Always contradict an authoritative statement, Always return a blow, Never lose a chance of a good fight, When you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who scolds you whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose, and follow the question with a blow or an insult or some other unmistakable expression of resentment, Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders, are just as important as those of The Sermon on the Mount; but no one has yet seen them written up in letters of gold in a schoolroom or nursery.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We have to confess it: Capitalist mankind in the lump is detestable. ...Both rich and poor are really hateful in themselves. For my part I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination. I pity the rich a little, but am equally bent on their extermination. The working classes, the ruling classes, the professional classes, the propertied classes, the ruling classes, are each more odious than the other: they have no right to live: I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves... And yet I am not in the least a misanthrope. I am a person of normal affections”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is far more likely that by the time nationalization has become the rule, and private enterprise the exception, Socialism (which is really rather a bad name for the business) will be spoken of, if at all, as a crazy religion held by a fanatical sect in that darkest of dark ages, the nineteenth century. Already, indeed, I am told that Socialism has had its day, and that the sooner we stop talking nonsense about it and set to work, like the practical people we are, to nationalize the coal mines and complete a national electrification scheme, the better. And I, who said forty years ago that we should have had Socialism already but for the Socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing. What I meant by my jibe at the Socialists of the eighteen-eighties was that nothing is ever done, and much is prevented, by people who do not realize that they cannot do everything at once.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I object to all punishment whatsoever. I don't want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people whom I want to kill. Not in any unkind or personal spirit. But it must be evident to all of you, you must all know half a dozen people at least, who are no use in this world; who are more trouble than they are worth. And I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board, just as he might come before the income tax commissioners, and say every 5 years or every 7 years, just put them there, and say, sir or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence; if you're not pulling your weight in the social boat; if you are not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can't be of very much use to yourself.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: George Bernard Shaw reopens capital punishment controversy", Paramount British Pictures (March 5, 1931)
“I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capability to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. The world must doubtless attach high value to the predictions of great men like me. I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of to-morrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of to-day. The medieval ecclesiastics either through ignorance or bigotry painted Muhammadanism in the darkest colours. They were in fact trained both to hate the man Muhammad and his religion. To them Muhammad was Anti-Christ. I have studied him — the wonderful man — and in my opinion far from being an Anti-Christ he must be called the Saviour of Humanity. I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much-needed peace and happiness. But to proceed, it was in the 19th century that honest thinkers like Carlyle, Goethe and Gibbon perceived intrinsic worth in the religion of Muhammad and thus there was some change for the better in the European attitude towards Islam. But the Europe of the present century is far advanced. It is beginning to be enamoured of the creed of Muhammad. In the next century it may go still further in recognising the utility of that creed in solving its problems and it is in this sense that you must understand my prediction. Already even at the present time many of my own people and of Europe as well have gone over to the faith of Muhammad, and the Islamization of Europe, to use the expression of your own query, may be said to have begun.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted in "Bernard Shaw's Latest On Islam", The Light (24 January 1933). See scan here linked from this page.
“The news from Germany is the very best news that we have had since the war. Ever since 1918 we, like all the other powers, have been behaving just as badly as we possibly could. Well now, when Germany fell, they want and they sat on Germany's head and they kept sitting on Germany's head, although it was quite preposterous, quite evident to any sensible persona, that they couldn't go on like that forever. Then there came a very intelligent gentleman named Adolf Hitler and he, knowing perfectly well that the powers would not fight, he snapped his fingers at the Treaty of Versailles. Just exactly as if we in England had been in the same position. As if the powers had beaten us and sat on our head.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From an interview (1935), as cited in James Curran, Anthony Smith and Pauline Wingate (eds.) Impacts and Influences: Media Power in the Twentieth Century (Taylor & Francis, 1987), pp. 90-91
“The apparent multiplicity of Gods is bewildering at the first glance; but you presently discover that they are all the same one God in different aspects and functions and even sexes. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible Gods... Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the profoundest Methodist and the crudest idolater are equally at home in it. Islam is very different, being ferociously intolerant. What I may call Manifold Monotheism becomes in the minds of very simple folk an absurdly polytheistic idolatry, just as European peasants not only worship Saints and the Virgin as Gods, but will fight fanatically for their faith in the ugly little black doll who is the Virgin of their own Church against the black doll of the next village. When the Arabs had run this sort of idolatry to such extremes ... they did this without black dolls and worshipped any stone that looked funny, Mahomet rose up at the risk of his life and insulted the stones shockingly, declaring that there is only one God, Allah, the glorious, the great... And there was to be no nonsense about toleration. You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell. Mahomet was a great Protestant religious force, like George Fox or Wesley.... There is actually a great Hindu sect, the Jains, with Temples of amazing magnificence, which abolish God, not on materialist atheist considerations, but as unspeakable and unknowable, transcending all human comprehension.”
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to the Reverend Ensor Walters (1933), as cited in Dan H. Laurence (ed) Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters, 1926-1950, New York: Viking (1988), p. 305