Produced by Russell Bell
Maxims for Revolutionists
by
George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950)
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Theirtastes may not be the same.
Never resist temptation: prove all things: hold fast that which is good.
Do not love your neighbor as yourself. If you are on good terms withyourself it is an impertinence: if on bad, an injury.
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
The art of government is the organization of idolatry.
The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols;the democracy, of idolaters.
The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship thenational idols.
The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man toidols of flesh and blood.
A limited monarchy is a device for combining the inertia of a woodenidol with the credibility of a flesh and blood one.
When the wooden idol does not answer the peasant's prayer, he beats it:when the flesh and blood idol does not satisfy the civilized man, hecuts its head off.
He who slays a king and he who dies for him are alike idolaters.
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. When theprocess is interrupted by adversity at a critical age, as in the case ofCharles II, the subject becomes sane and never completely recovers hiskingliness.
The Court is the servant's hall of the sovereign.
Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.
The flunkeyism propagated by the throne is the price we pay for itspolitical convenience.
If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measurea pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, thepolitical problem remains unsolved.
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointmentby the corrupt few.
Democratic republics can no more dispense with national idols thanmonarchies with public functionaries.
Government presents only one problem: the discovery of a trustworthyanthropometric method.
Excess of insularity makes a Briton an Imperialist.
Excess of local self-assertion makes a colonist an Imperialist.
A colonial Imperialist is one who raises colonial troops, equips acolonial squadron, claims a Federal Parliament sending its measures tothe Throne instead of to the Colonial Office, and, being finally broughtby this means into insoluble conflict with the insular BritishImperialist, "cuts the painter" and breaks up the Empire.
He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equalitywith similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.
Nothing can be unconditional: consequently nothing can be free.
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal ofthe Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hangedequally if t