Top 100 George Bernard Shaw Quotes
#1. There are scores of thousands of human insects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the Will of God on every possible subject
George Bernard Shaw
#2. As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.
George Bernard Shaw
#3. Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat?
Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.
George Bernard Shaw
#4. Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.
George Bernard Shaw
#5. Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish. I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one.
George Bernard Shaw
#6. There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage.
George Bernard Shaw
#8. Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
George Bernard Shaw
#9. If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.
George Bernard Shaw
#10. The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.
George Bernard Shaw
#11. Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.
George Bernard Shaw
#12. Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
George Bernard Shaw
#13. You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.
George Bernard Shaw
#14. If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.
George Bernard Shaw
#15. Women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men.
George Bernard Shaw
#16. No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
George Bernard Shaw
#17. The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
George Bernard Shaw
#19. People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.
George Bernard Shaw
#20. The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.
George Bernard Shaw
#21. It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something.
George Bernard Shaw
#22. You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
George Bernard Shaw
#23. When the horrors of anarchy force us to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts content.
George Bernard Shaw
#24. A newspaper, not having to act on its descriptions and reports, but only to sell them to idly curious people, has nothing but honor to lose by inaccuracy and non-veracity.
George Bernard Shaw
#25. My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.
George Bernard Shaw
#26. When you prevent me from doing anything I want to do, that is persecution; when I prevent you from doing anything you want to do, that is law, order, and morals.
George Bernard Shaw
#27. The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.
George Bernard Shaw
#29. The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.
George Bernard Shaw
#31. A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.
George Bernard Shaw
#32. As 99 per cent of English authors and 100 per cent of American ones [authors] are just such imbeciles, managers and publishers make a practice of asking for every right the author possesses.
George Bernard Shaw
#34. Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.
George Bernard Shaw
#35. The British churchgoer prefers a severe preacher because he thinks a few home truths will do his neighbors no harm.
George Bernard Shaw
#36. What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it.
George Bernard Shaw
#37. There is no magic in marriage. If there were, married couples would never desire to seperate. But they do.
George Bernard Shaw
#38. Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place.
George Bernard Shaw
#39. I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.
George Bernard Shaw
#41. People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
George Bernard Shaw
#42. It annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don't like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it. In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I
George Bernard Shaw
#43. Money enables us to get what we want instead of what other people think we want.
George Bernard Shaw
#44. Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw
#46. Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population.
George Bernard Shaw
#47. Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
George Bernard Shaw
#48. What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man's fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him?
as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!
George Bernard Shaw
#51. To disbelieve in marriage is easy: to love a married woman is easy; but to betray a comrade, to be disloyal to a host, to break the covenant of bread and salt, is impossible.
George Bernard Shaw
#52. Be like the sun and meadow, which are not in the least concerned about the coming winter.
George Bernard Shaw
#53. It is feeling that sets a man thinking, and not thought that sets him feeling.
George Bernard Shaw
#54. In the right key one can say anything. In the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part is the establishment of the key.
George Bernard Shaw
#55. Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.
George Bernard Shaw
#56. Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.
George Bernard Shaw
#60. We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
George Bernard Shaw
#61. We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
George Bernard Shaw
#62. If any religion had a chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.
George Bernard Shaw
#63. I do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it ... I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends.
George Bernard Shaw
#64. She has mischievious moments when she wishes she could get him alone on a desert island ...
George Bernard Shaw
#65. I don't know what to say about this book. The experience on which it is founded is so extraordinary, that an honest record of it should be preserved ... But it would have driven me mad; and I am not sure that the author came out of it without a slight derangement.
George Bernard Shaw
#67. There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses.
George Bernard Shaw
#68. Capitalism justified itself and was adopted as an economic principle on the express ground that it provides selfish motives for doing good, and that human beings will do nothing except for selfish motives
George Bernard Shaw
#70. Christmas is forced upon a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred.
George Bernard Shaw
#71. Think what cowards men would be if they had to bear children. Women are altogether a superior species.
George Bernard Shaw
#73. Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist.
George Bernard Shaw
#75. The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.
George Bernard Shaw
#76. I assume that to prevent illness in later life, you should never have been born at all.
George Bernard Shaw
#77. We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
George Bernard Shaw
#78. The most sublime courage I have ever witnessed has been among that class too poor to know they possessed it, and too humble for the world to discover it.
George Bernard Shaw
#79. Alcohol is a very necessary article. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.
George Bernard Shaw
#80. I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
George Bernard Shaw
#81. Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.
George Bernard Shaw
#82. Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air ... It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.
George Bernard Shaw
#83. We have in England a curious belief in first-rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable second-rateness of the people we do know.
George Bernard Shaw
#84. When I speak of The Case for Equality I mean human equality; and that, of course, can only mean one thing: it means equality of income.
George Bernard Shaw
#88. I'm glad he's hungry. Not that I want him to suffer, poor chap! But then he'll enjoy eating me much more. There's a cheerful side to everything.
George Bernard Shaw
#89. I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.
George Bernard Shaw
#91. The British and Americans are two people separated by a common language.
George Bernard Shaw
#92. If we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.
George Bernard Shaw
#93. Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.
George Bernard Shaw
#94. But I cant stand saying one thing when everyone knows I mean another. Whats the use in such hypocrisy? If people arrange the world that way for women, theres no good pretending it's arranged the other way ...
George Bernard Shaw
#95. Oh, well, if you want original conversations, you'd better go and talk to yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
#96. The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.
George Bernard Shaw
#97. Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce greatpoetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.
George Bernard Shaw
#99. Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment.
George Bernard Shaw
#100. I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going.
George Bernard Shaw
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