George Bernard Shaw Quotes
What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.
Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion. Constable and Co., 1916, p. 104.
Spinoza was one of the most feared intellectuals in human history—feared that is by the established power structures. He is the only known person who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims. He was the enemy of authority and advocated personal reason as the guide for men.
In the golden intellectual and science eras of Arabian Islam from 900-1300 individualism and independence of thought were much cherished virtues. In the 1100s, there began a period of theological and intellectual closing where the individual’s views were expected to conform to that of the then “proper” interpretation of the Koran and Islamic Dominance over all things. By the 1300s there were few Arab Muslims who would speak out for individual freedom of thought and rugged intellectual independence from the doctrine of the times. He was one of the few who advocated being back to the “old days” when Islam was far ahead of the intellectual thinking of the world. Few paid heed and Arab Islam has for the last 800 years been a shadow of its former intellectual achievements and has become a backward, stultified set of societies where one rarely finds an intellectual who does not depend on the community consensus and the values of the mullahs and muftis of the time rather than their own.
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. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
