Top 100 George Bernard Shaw Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. If a farmer calls me to a sick animal, he couldn't care less if I were George Bernard Shaw.
James Herriot
#4. Uniqueness Leads To Great Success Some men see things as they are and say 'why?' I dream things that never were, and say, 'why not?' --George Bernard Shaw English Dramatist (1856-1950)
John Paul Carinci
#5. The author relates George Bernard Shaw's sentiments that polite conversation excludes the only two subjects that matter, religion and politics.
Lyle W. Dorsett
#6. George Bernard Shaw writes like a Pakistani who has learned English when he was twelve years old in order to become an accountant.
John Osborne
#7. I made use of the college library by borrowing books other than scientific books, such as all of the plays by George Bernard Shaw, the writing of Edgar Allan Poe. The college library helped me to develop a broader aspect on life.
Linus Pauling
#8. 'Man and Superman,' first performed in 1905, is by common consent one of George Bernard Shaw's greatest and most significant plays, yet hardly anybody performs it today, for the understandable reason that an uncut performance runs for about five hours.
Terry Teachout
#9. BORN: 1856 George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman, Major Barbara), Dublin 1894 Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Crome Yellow), Godalming, England DIED: 1934 Winsor McCay
Tom Nissley
#10. An idiot child screaming in a hospital." (on George Bernard Shaw)
H.G.Wells
#11. P.G. Wodehouse was a huge influence on me when I was younger, as were Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Bernard Shaw.
Michael Moorcock
#12. Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. - George Bernard Shaw
Wayne W. Dyer
#13. It is easier to put people in chains than to remove them if the chains bring prestige, said George Bernard Shaw.
Simone De Beauvoir
#14. When Jennie, mother of Winston Churchill invited playwright George Bernard Shaw to lunch, he telegraphed: "Certainly not. What have I done to provoke such an attack on my well-known habits?" She replied, "Know nothing of your habits; hope they are better than your manners."
Anne Sebba
#15. Churchill was one of the few men I have met who even in the flesh give me the impression of genius. George Bernard Shaw is another. It is amusing to know that each thinks the other is overrated.
David Low
#16. Rees's First Law of Quotations: When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to George Bernard Shaw.
Nigel Rees
#17. George Bernard Shaw said: "People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them." Well,
Earl Nightingale
#18. Nobody can read Freud without realizing that he was the scientific equivalent of another nuisance, George Bernard Shaw.
Robert M. Hutchins
#19. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them. - George Bernard Shaw
Steve Levinson
#20. George Bernard Shaw said that thinking was the greatest of all human endeavors, but I would say that feeling was. Allowing yourself to feel things, to feel love or wrath, hatred, rage.
Marlon Brando
#21. His only weakness was the habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight. George Bernard Shaw
Barbara W. Tuchman
#22. Concerning no subject would [George Bernard] Shaw be deterred by the minor accident of total ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.
Roger Scruton
#23. People believe pictures. It's a photograph that's in your passport, not a painting. Now,
George Bernard Shaw said, 'I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot.' That's what the power of photography is.
Philip Jones Griffiths
#24. in the words of George Bernard Shaw, marriage inspired by love brings two people together "under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions.
Sheena Iyengar
#25. It was George Bernard Shaw who famously said that you should not do to others as you would wish to be done to - the famous 'golden rule' of moral philosophy - because they might have other tastes.
Will Buckingham
#26. George Bernard Shaw of England stopped over just long enough to make one speech in Bombay, India, started a war and 100 Indians killed each other. That's what I call good speech-making. The only enthusiasm any of our speakers can rouse is a demand to kill the speaker.
Will Rogers
#27. 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
#28. I'm sick of all the reasonable people: they see all the reasons for doing nothing
George Bernard Shaw
#30. I believe in the discipline of silence, and could talk for hours about it.
George Bernard Shaw
#31. 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
#32. Only Lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty.
George Bernard Shaw
#33. Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
George Bernard Shaw
#34. 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
#35. You know you can't be a nice girl inside if you're a dirty slut outside
George Bernard Shaw
#36. Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.
George Bernard Shaw
#37. Some men see things as they are, and say, why; I dream things as they never were, and say, why not.
George Bernard Shaw
#41. 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
#42. 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
#44. What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard Shaw
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
George Bernard Shaw
#48. 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
#49. The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.
George Bernard Shaw
#51. 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
#52. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
George Bernard Shaw
#58. 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
#59. The statesman cannot govern without stability of belief, true or false.
George Bernard Shaw
#61. 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
#62. Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak!
George Bernard Shaw
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.
George Bernard Shaw
#70. A socialist is somebody who doesn't have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody.
George Bernard Shaw
#71. The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.
George Bernard Shaw
#72. People get tired of everything, and of nothing sooner than of what they most like.
George Bernard Shaw
#73. It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good.
George Bernard Shaw
#74. 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
#75. I don't like the idea of killing my fellow creatures in order to eat their dead bodies.
George Bernard Shaw
#76. 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
#77. My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately
George Bernard Shaw
#78. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. I occasionally swank a little because people like it; a modest man is such a nuisance.
George Bernard Shaw
#89. 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
#90. 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
#93. Unless the law of marriage were first made human, it could never become divine.
George Bernard Shaw
#94. Make money and the whole nation will conspire to call you a gentleman.
George Bernard Shaw
#95. 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
#96. I was always unlawful; I broke the law when I was born because my parents weren't married.
George Bernard Shaw
#97. This planet is obviously being used as an insane asylum by other planets.
George Bernard Shaw
#98. 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
#100. 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
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