George Jean Nathan Quotes
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Sex touches the heavens only when it simultaneously touches the gutter and the mud.
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Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.
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In the theatre, a hero is one who believes that all women are ladies, a villain one who believes that all ladies are women.
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One does not go to the theater to see life and nature; one goes to see the particular way in which life and nature happen to look to a cultivated, imaginative and entertaining man who happens, in turn, to be a playwright.
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A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.
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There is no legimate actor who can resist the powerful lure of the movies. It isn't the money that fetches him. It isn't the great publicity. It is simply this: the movies enable an actor to look at himself.
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What passes for woman's intuition is more often intrinsically nothing more than man's transparency.
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A man's wife is his compromise with the illusion of his first sweetheart.
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Love is an emotion experienced by the many and enjoyed by the few.
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The sweetest memory is that which involves something which one should not have done; the bitterest, that which involves something which one should not have done, and which one did not do.
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Love demands infinitely less than friendship.
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Men go to the theatre to forget; women, to remember.
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The most loyal and faithful woman indulges her imagination in a hypothetical liaison whenever she dons a new street frock for the first time.
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The notion that as a man grows older his illusions leave him is not quite true. What is true is that his early illusions are supplanted by new, and to him, equally convincing illusions.
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There is something distinguished about even his failures; they sink not trivially, but with a certain air of majesty, like a great ship, its flags flying, full of holes.
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It may be said that artist and censor differ in this wise: that the first is a decent mind in an indecent body and that the second is an indecent mind in a decent body.
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An abstainer is the sort of man you wouldn't want to drink with even if he did.
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Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.
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Beauty makes idiots sad and wise men merry.
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Great drama is the souvenir of the adventure of a master among the pieces of his own soul.
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A man may be said to love most truly that woman in whose company he can feel drowsy in comfort.
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Shaw writes plays for the ages, the ages between five and twelve.
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A ready way to lose your friend is to lend him money. Another equally ready way to lose him is to refuse to lend him money. It is six of one and a half dozen of the other.
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Criticism is the art of appraising others at one's own value.
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I have yet to find a man worth his salt in any direction who did not think of himself first and foremost.
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The bachelors admired freedom is often a yoke, for the freer a man is to himself the greater slave he often is to the whims of others.
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Whenever a man encounters a woman in a mood he doesn't understand, he wants to know if she's tired.
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Bad officials are the ones elected by good citizens who do not vote.
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All that is necessary to raise imbecility into what the mob regards as profundity is to lift it off the floor and put it on a platform.
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The test of a real comedian is whether you laugh at him before he opens his mouth.
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