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. I'm sick of all the reasonable people: they see all the reasons for doing nothing
George Bernard Shaw
#4. I believe in the discipline of silence, and could talk for hours about it.
George Bernard Shaw
#5. The reasonable man will adjust to the demands of his environment. The unreasonable man expects his environment to adjust to his own needs. Therefore, all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
#6. Only Lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty.
George Bernard Shaw
#7. Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
George Bernard Shaw
#8. The cinema is going to form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct, will be those of the film.
George Bernard Shaw
#9. You know you can't be a nice girl inside if you're a dirty slut outside
George Bernard Shaw
#10. Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
#11. Some men see things as they are, and say, why; I dream things as they never were, and say, why not.
George Bernard Shaw
#15. You have nothing to do but mention the quantum theory, and people will take your voice for the voice of science, and belive anything.
George Bernard Shaw
#16. A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.
George Bernard Shaw
#18. What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard Shaw
#19. 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
#20. A modern gentleman [rich person] is necessarily the enemy of his country. Even in war he does not fight to defend it, but to prevent his power of preying on it from passing to a foreigner.
George Bernard Shaw
#21. Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
George Bernard Shaw
#22. What I say today everybody will say tomorrow, though they will not remember who put it into their heads. Indeed they will be right for I never remember who puts things into my head : it is the Zeitgeist.
George Bernard Shaw
#23. The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.
George Bernard Shaw
#25. Always strive to find out what to do by thinking, without asking anybody. If you continually do this, you will soon act like a grown-up woman. For want of doing this, a very great number of grown-up people act like children.
George Bernard Shaw
#26. I am a sort of collector of religions: and the curious thing is that I find I can believe in them all.
George Bernard Shaw
#28. You sometimes have to answer a woman according to her womanliness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his folly.
George Bernard Shaw
#29. Without danger I cannot be great. That is how I pay for Abel's blood. Danger and fear follow my steps everywhere. Without them courage would have no sense. And it is courage, courage, courage that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.
George Bernard Shaw
#30. If all the Churches of Europe closed their doors until the drums ceased rolling they would act as a most powerful reminder that though the glory of war is a famous and ancient glory, it is not the final glory of God.
George Bernard Shaw
#31. What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
George Bernard Shaw
#32. Nobody supposes that doctors are less virtuous than judges;
but a judge whose salary and reputation depended on whether
the verdict was for plaintiff or defendant, prosecutor or prisoner,
would be as little trusted as a general in the pay of the enemy.
George Bernard Shaw
#33. The statesman cannot govern without stability of belief, true or false.
George Bernard Shaw
#35. When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
George Bernard Shaw
#36. Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak!
George Bernard Shaw
#37. Most of my recent plays were written in the railway train between Hatfield and Kings Cross. I write anywhere, on the top of omnibuses or wherever I may be; it is all the same to me.
George Bernard Shaw
#39. 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
#40. Character actor' is a technical term denoting a clever stage performer who cannot act, and therefore makes an elaborate study of the disguises and stage tricks by which acting can be grotesquely simulated.
George Bernard Shaw
#41. Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.
George Bernard Shaw
#44. A socialist is somebody who doesn't have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody.
George Bernard Shaw
#45. The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.
George Bernard Shaw
#46. People get tired of everything, and of nothing sooner than of what they most like.
George Bernard Shaw
#47. It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good.
George Bernard Shaw
#48. The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.
George Bernard Shaw
#49. I don't like the idea of killing my fellow creatures in order to eat their dead bodies.
George Bernard Shaw
#50. A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.
George Bernard Shaw
#51. My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately
George Bernard Shaw
#52. 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.
George Bernard Shaw
#54. 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
#55. I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend ... if you have one."
- George Bernard Shaw, playwright (to Winston Churchill)
"Cannot possibly attend first night; will attend second, if there is one."
- Churchill's response
George Bernard Shaw
#56. I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettishness, without being either good business men or fine judges of literature.
George Bernard Shaw
#57. In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.
George Bernard Shaw
#60. Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.
George Bernard Shaw
#61. It is ridiculous to say that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is that the artist's business is not that of the policeman.
George Bernard Shaw
#62. I occasionally swank a little because people like it; a modest man is such a nuisance.
George Bernard Shaw
#64. The popular definition of tragedy is heavy drama in which everyone is killed in the last act, comedy being light drama in which everyone is married in the last act.
George Bernard Shaw
#65. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.
George Bernard Shaw
#68. Unless the law of marriage were first made human, it could never become divine.
George Bernard Shaw
#69. Make money and the whole nation will conspire to call you a gentleman.
George Bernard Shaw
#70. Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend - if you have one. Telegram inviting Winston Churchill to opening night of Pygmalion. Churchill wired back: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second - if there is one.
George Bernard Shaw
#71. I was always unlawful; I broke the law when I was born because my parents weren't married.
George Bernard Shaw
#72. This planet is obviously being used as an insane asylum by other planets.
George Bernard Shaw
#73. The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.
George Bernard Shaw
#75. An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.
George Bernard Shaw
#76. Affection between adults - if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown up children - and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural.
George Bernard Shaw
#78. America was aptly described by George Bernard Shaw, who said that it was 'the only country which had gone from barbarism to decadence without once passing through civilization.' Guy
Maya Angelou
#80. There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage.
George Bernard Shaw
#81. Though justice be Thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy.
George Bernard Shaw
#82. If a farmer calls me to a sick animal, he couldn't care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.
James Herriot
#83. I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.
George Bernard Shaw
#84. I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like the state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.
George Bernard Shaw
#86. A vegetarian is not a person who lives on vegetables, any more than a Catholic is a person who lives on cats.
George Bernard Shaw
#88. When a lion meets another with a louder roar the first lion thinks the last a bore.
George Bernard Shaw
#89. You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.
George Bernard Shaw
#91. When a prisoner sees the door of his dungeon open, he dashes for it without stopping to think where he shall get his dinner outside.
George Bernard Shaw
#93. I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, ininvention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.
George Bernard Shaw
#94. We are the living graves of murdered beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our appetites. How can we hope in this world to attain the peace we say we are so anxious for?
George Bernard Shaw
#95. You may well ask me why ... I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.
George Bernard Shaw
#96. Iscussing vaccination with a doctor is like discussing vegetarianism with a butcher ...
George Bernard Shaw
#98. The open mind never acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions.
George Bernard Shaw
#99. Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
George Bernard Shaw
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