George Bernard Shaw, known at his insistence 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 (1913) 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.
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat,
for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we
believe it to be round, not because as many as one per cent
of us could give the physical reasons for so quaint a belief,
but because modern science has convinced us that nothing
that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical,
improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless,
or outrageous is scientific.
