George B Shaw - Collected Quotes

"Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience." (George B Shaw, "Maxims for Revolutionists", 1903)

"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 B Shaw, "Maxims for Revolutionists", 1903)

"Even trained statisticians often fail to appreciate the extent to which statistics are vitiated by the unrecorded assumptions of their interpreters." (George B Shaw, "The Doctor's Dilemma", 1906)

"Mind you, that you have a sound scientific theory to correlate your observations at the bedside. Mere experience by itself is nothing." (George B Shaw, "The Doctor's Dilemma", 1906)

"For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live." (George B Shaw, "Back to Methuselah", 1921)

“Every moment of time dictated and determined the following moment, and was itself dictated and determined by the moment that came before it. Everything was calculable: everything happened because it must; the commandments were erased from the tables of the law; and in their place came the cosmic algebra: the equations of the mathematicians.” (George B Shaw, “Too True to Be Good”, 1934)

"And nobody can get far without at least an acquaintance with the mathematics of probability, not to the extent of making its calculations and filling examination papers with typical equations, but enough to know when they can be trusted, and when they are cooked. For when their imaginary numbers correspond to exact quantities of hard coins unalterably stamped with heads and tails, they are safe within certain limits; for here we have solid certainty [...] but when the calculation is one of no constant and several very capricious variables, guesswork, personal bias, and pecuniary interests, come in so strong that those who began by ignorantly imagining that statistics cannot lie end by imagining, equally ignorantly, that they never do anything else." (George B Shaw, "The Vice of Gambling and the Virtue of Insurance", 1944)

"Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art. (George B Shaw)

"Nothing remains beautiful and interesting except thought, because the thought is the life." (George B Shaw)

"Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating ten more." (George B Shaw)

The right to know is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing." (George B Shaw)