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Maxims for Revolutionists
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Maxims for Revolutionists.
George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond.
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Maxims for Revolutionists
George Bernard Shaw
THE GOLDEN RULE
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.
Do not love your neighbor as yourself. If you are on good terms with yourself it is an impertinence: if on bad, an injury.
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
IDOLATRY
The art of government is the organization of idolatry.
The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters.
The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.
A limited monarchy is a device for combining the inertia of a wooden idol with the credibility of a flesh and blood one.
When the wooden idol does not answer the peasant's prayer, he beats it: when the flesh and blood idol does not satisfy the civilized man, he cuts its head off.
He who slays a king and he who dies for him are alike idolaters.
ROYALTY
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. When the process is interrupted by adversity at a critical age, as in the case of Charles II, the subject becomes sane and never completely recovers his kingliness.
The Court is the servant's hall of the sovereign.
Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.
The flunkeyism propagated by the throne is the price we pay for its political convenience.
DEMOCRACY
If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
Democratic republics can no more dispense with national idols than monarchies with public functionaries.
Government presents only one problem: the discovery of a trustworthy anthropometric method.
IMPERIALISM
Excess of insularity makes a Briton an Imperialist.
Excess of local self-assertion makes a colonist an Imperialist.
A colonial Imperialist is one who raises colonial troops, equips a colonial squadron, claims a Federal Parliament sending its measures to the Throne instead of to the Colonial Office, and, being finally brought by this means into insoluble conflict with the insular British Imperialist, "cuts the painter" and breaks up the Empire.
LIBERTY AND EQUALITY
He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.
Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.
The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.
Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.
Equality is fundamental in every department of social organization.
The relation of superior to inferior excludes good manners.
EDUCATION
When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.
The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.
At the University every great treatise is postponed until its author attains impartial judgment and perfect knowledge. If a horse could wait as long for its shoes and would pay for them in advance, our blacksmiths would all be college dons.
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance.
Activity is the only road to knowledge.
Every f...
Table of contents
- Maxims for Revolutionists
- George Bernard Shaw