Jacques BarzunThinkers

George Bernard Shaw never invested his whole moral capital in a man, a book, or a cause, but treasured up wisdom wherever it could be picked up, always with scrupulous acknowledgment; His eclecticism saving him from the cycle of hope-disillusion-despair, his highest effectiveness was as a skirmisher in the daily battle for light and justice, as a critic of new doctrine and a refurbisher of old, as a voice of warning and encouragement.

George Bernard Shaw , seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position -- including his own -- assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly.

George Bernard Shaw is a writer who does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory.

George Bernard Shaw is the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.

George Bernard Shaw is a writer who knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what others have thought, what all this thinking entails; and he takes the most elaborate pains to bring these thoughts to light in a form which is by turns abstract and familiar, conciliatory and aggressive, obvious and inferential, comic and puzzling.

George Bernard Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought — certainly the most conscious since Rousseau.