On this date in 1926 George Bernard Shaw refused to accept the money for his Nobel Prize, saying, “I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.”

Frye cites another famous Shaw quote in conversation with David Cayley:

Cayley: Have you ever wondered whether education is wasted on the young?

Frye: It’s like Bernard Shaw says, “Youth is too valuable to be wasted on the young.”  You’re rather stuck with it.  I think that students at university have many obstacles thrown in their way by the pedantry and misunderstandings of their teachers and so forth, but those are human conflicts.  We all have those.