Strangers who have seen Shaw face to face are wont to report their surprise at his gentleness and consideration, his willingness to listen and his co… - Jacques Barzun

Shaw 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. In a word, Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought — certainly the most conscious since Rousseau; which may be why both of them often create the same impression of insincerity amounting to charlatanism. Yet it is by excess of honesty that Shaw himself lent color to his representation as an inconsequential buffoon bent on monopolizing the spotlight.

Society hardly ever follows its blueprint, a fact that makes comparisons extremely difficult and judgments more than usually fallible.

I quite understand how we are driven to lead statistical lives, but I repeat that it is the duty of art to make us imagine the particular; to make us understand that the rights of one human being are not a fraction of the rights of more than one, and at the same time that in any situation of collective evil, the suffering is felt by no more than one person; only one feels the bitter agony of injustice, only one dies