Major Barbara & Selected Correspondence Relating to the Play

The selected correspondence of Bernard Shaw relating to the play Major Barbara contains 178 letters and entries, written between 1891 and 1950. This publication from "John Bull's Other Island and Major Barbara: also How He Lied to Her Husband, Constable and Company Ltd, London, 1920" is a handmade reproduc-tion from the original edition, and remains as true to the original work as possible. The original edition was processed manually by means of a classic editing which ensures the quality of publications and the unrestricted enjoyment of reading.
Here are some inspirational book quotes from Bernard Shaw: 'When all the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity, since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world hap-pens to agree.' 'Marx's "Capital" is as amateurish in its abstract economics as Ruskin's Munera Pulveris, or, for the matter of that, as Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; but for all that it is one of the books that has changed the mind of the world.' 'I do not say that my books and plays cannot do harm to weak or dishonest people. They can, and probably do. But if the American character cannot stand that fire even at the earliest age at which it is readable or intelligible, there is no future for America.' 'Now I want to make a suggestion to the press. I dont ask them to give up abusing me, or declaring that my plays are not plays and my characters not human beings. Not for worlds would I deprive them of the inexhaustible pleasure these paradoxes seem to give them. But I do ask them, for the sake of the actors and of Vedrenne and Barker's enterprise, to reverse the order of their attacks and their caresses. In the future, instead of abusing the new play and praising the one before, let them abuse the one before and praise the new one.' 'I regard a writer who is convinced that his views are right and sound as a very dangerous kind of lunatic. He is to be found in every asylum; and his delusion is that he is the Pope, or even a higher authority than the Pope.' 'All the faithful I have known have been rough and unsympathetic at times, all the charming persons I have known have been faithless in some of the relations of life.' 'An educated man, according to the old formula, is one who knows everything of something or something of everything.' 'But would anyone but a buffle headed idiot of a university professor, half crazy with correcting examination papers (another infamous activity pursued under economic pressure) immediately shriek that all my plays were written as economic essays, and that I did not know that they were plays of life, character, and human destiny as much as Shakespear's or Euripides's?' 'My plays are miracles of dramatic organization because I have never constructed them: there is not an ounce of dead wood in them: every bit of them is alive for somebody. To me constructed plays are all dead wood, bearable only for the sake of such scraps of sentiment or fun or observation as the artificer has been able to stick on them.' 'The cost of getting old is that one does and says things without realising what effect they may have on other people or oneself.' 'There is a point at which continuous successes will make a man believe that he can achieve anything.' 'I have honor and humanity on my side, wit in my head, skill in my hand, and a higher life for my aim.' 'It is not the story that matters but the way it is told.'

Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and influencer. Shaw is one of only two people in the world to have won both a Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938).