Quotes from George Bernard Shaw's books, and about them
Arms and the Man on Don Quixote: “He did it like an operatic tenor--a regular handsome fellow, with flashing eyes and lovely moustache, shouting a war-cry and charging like Don Quixote at the windmills.”
Man and Superman on Faust: “Mozart's is the last of the true Don Juans; for by the time he was of age, his cousin Faust had, in the hands of Goethe, taken his place and carried both his warfare and his reconciliation with the gods far beyond mere lovemaking into politics, high art, schemes for reclaiming new continents from…”
Man and Superman on Inferno: “I have enjoyed, too, my rests, my recuperations, my breathing times, my very prostrations after strife; but rather would I be dragged through all the circles of the foolish Italian's Inferno than through the pleasures of Europe.”
Man and Superman on Everyman: “Ann was suggested to me by the fifteenth century Dutch morality called Everyman, which Mr William Poel has lately resuscitated so triumphantly.”
Man and Superman on Don Quixote: “When his swagger is exhausted he drivels into erotic poetry or sentimental uxoriousness; and the Tennysonian King Arthur posing as Guinevere becomes Don Quixote grovelling before Dulcinea.”
Man and Superman on Henry V: “…actions are forced on them from without, and the external force is grotesquely inappropriate except when it is quite conventional, as in the case of Henry V.”
Man and Superman on El Burlador de Sevilla: “What attracts and impresses us in El Burlador de Sevilla is not the immediate urgency of repentance, but the heroism of daring to be the enemy of God.”
Man and Superman on The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table: “When he finds people chattering harmlessly about Anatole France and Nietzsche, he devastates them with Matthew Arnold, the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, and even Macaulay”
Major Barbara on The Republic: “My parting gift to him was not a copy of Plato's Republic, but a revolver and a hundred Undershaft cartridges.”
Mrs Warren's Profession on Julius Caesar: “Many plays, among them Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, have no sex complications: the thread of their action can be followed by children who could not understand a single scene of Mrs Warren's Profession or Iris.”