(3089/898) The Shavian moment

83) Gratefully conscious of all they have meant to me, I declare friendship to be the most precious thing in life. But it is like a plant that withers if it is not heedfully fostered and tendered. It is only by constant thought, by visits, by little services, and by abounding sympathy at all times, that friends can be kept. I implore my children to remember this [...]

Sir Sydney Cockerell
quoted by Hugh Whitemore in
Best of Friends (play, 1988),
[adapted from the letters and writings of
Dame Laurentia McLachlen, Sir Sydney Cockerell
and George Bernard Shaw]

84) Pakenham Beatty - Irish playboy, amateur pugilist, minor poet in the Sinburne flight [...] was not 'sensible' about money. He spent it in the Irish manner, generously, spontaneously, without thought, until everything was gone and he was left with nothing but the settled habit of spending.

Michael Holroyd
Bernard Shaw: The Search for Love (1988)

85) The moral drawn [...] was that as nobody could be trusted to govern the people the people must govern themselves, which was nonsense [...] But this assumption suited the plutocrats very well, as they had only to master the easy art of stampeding elections by their newspapers to do anything they liked in the name of the people. Votes for everybody (called for short, Democracy) ended in government neither of the best nor of the worst, but in an official government which could do nothing but talk, and an actual government of landlords, employers, and financiers at war with an Opposition of trade unionists, strikers, pickets, and - occasionally - rioters. The resultant disorder, indiscipline, and breakdown of distribution, produced a reaction of purer disappointment and distress in which the people looked wildly around for a Savior, and were ready to give a hopeful trial to anyone bold enough to assume dictatorship and kick aside the impotent official government until he had completely muzzled and subjugated it.

[George] Bernard Shaw
Too True To Be Good (play, 1933)

86) That's one of your favorite tricks, Mr. Lewis [...] You redescribe your opponent's arguments with a dismissive image, and you think you've dismissed the argument.

William Nicholson
Shadowlands (play, 1986)
[spoken by the character "Joy" (Gresham)
to the character "Jack" (C.S. Lewis)]

87) The theory of legal procedure is that if you set two liars to expose one another, the truth will emerge.

[George] Bernard Shaw
Too True To Be Good (play) (1933)

88) At the trial, which sent a saint to the stake as a heretic and a sorceress, the truth was told; the law was upheld; mercy was shewn beyond all custom; no wrong was done but the final and dreadful wrong of the lying sentence and the pitiless fire. At this inquiry from which I have just come, there was shameless perjury, courtly corruption, calumny of the dead who did their duty according to their lights, cowardly evasion of the issue, testimony made of idle tales that could not impose on a ploughboy. Yet out of this insult to justice, this defamation of the Church, this orgy of lying and foolishness, the truth is set in the noonday sun on the hilltop; the white robe of innocence is cleansed from the smirch of the burning faggots; the holy life is sanctified; the true heart that lived through the flame is consecrated; a great lie is silenced for ever; and a great wrong is set right before all men.

[George] Bernard Shaw
Saint Joan (play, 1923)
[spoken by the character "Ladvenu"]

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 872 days remaining in the administration of the worst President ever.