P.K. Shaw Quotes

If you wanna dance, a windshield wiper'll do it-all you need is a beat.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

The great secret...is not having bad manners or good manners...but having the same manner for all human souls.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions.

The 100% American is 99% idiot.

It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.

Activity is the only road to knowledge.

When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.

It is better to be true to what you believe, though that be wrong, than to be false to what you believe, even if that belief is correct.

Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.

Wicked people means people who have no love: therefore, they have no shame. They have the power to ask love because the don't need it: they have the power to offer it because they have none to give.

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

Success is fickle, but creativity is a gift.

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich-something for nothing.

After all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.

I really believe that entrepreneurship is about being able to face failure, manage failure and succeed after failing.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.

My biggest problem in middle school was catty girls, cliques, and trying to figure out if I wanted to be a part of one of those, just figuring out who I was and all that.

Grain by grain, a loaf. Stone upon stone, a palace.

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

If you think about brewing, it is biotechnology. And I would say that I was a technologist at heart. So whether I... fermented beer or whether I fermented enzymes, the base technology was the same.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

As you become more successful, the gender barrier disappears. The credibility challenges you have during your growing up years starts disappearing when you start demonstrating success.

I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.

Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

There once was a demographic survey done to determine if money was connected to happiness and Ireland was the only place where this did not turn out to be true.

Opera is when a tenor and soprano want to make love, but are prevented from doing so by a baritone.

You can't beat a nice glass of Chardonnay after a really long, hard day.

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

There are two things necessary to Salvation.... Money and gunpowder.

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

You never know who's going to be in the audience. You never know who is going to be hearing that piece for the first time, and you never know who is going to be hearing that piece for the last time.

If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman's pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.