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

Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory. This explains why Shaw must either be taken whole or left alone. He must be disassembled and put together again with nothing left out, under pain of incomprehension; for his politics, his art, and his religion — to say nothing of the shape of his sentences — are unique expressions of this enormously enlarged and yet concentrated consciousness.

Among the words that can be all things to all men, the word "race" has a fair claim to being the most common, most ambiguous and most explosive. No one today would deny that it is one of the great catchwords about which ink and blood are spilled in reckless quantities. Yet no agreement seems to exist about what race means.

We are accustomed to the artist scoundrel or specialist in vice, and unaccustomed to the creator in whom passion and reason and moral integrity hold in balance. But greatness of intellect and feeling, or soul and conduct — magnanimity, in short — does occur; it is not a myth for boy scouts, and its reality is important, if only to give us the true range of the term "human," which we so regularly define by its lower reaches.