George Bernard Shaw Quotes

You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.

Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date.

I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time.... What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.

I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler; I don't like beer.

It is very doubtful whether man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious and efficient constitution. All the evidence is against it.

The politician who once had to learn to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

The ideal love affair should be conducted by post.

Taking all the round of professions and occupations, you will find that every man is the worse for being poor; and the doctor is a specially dangerous man when poor.

The real pleasure of one's life is the devotion to a great objective of one's consideration.

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.

When you read a biography remember that the truth is never fit for publication.

There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have charge of children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.

God is on the side of the big battalions.

If only for a half hour a day, a child should do something serviceable to the community

I must have been an insufferable child; all children are.

The business man - the man to whom age brings golf instead of wisdom.

For the pre-Darwinian age had come to be regarded as a Dark Age in which men still believed that the book of Genesis was a standard scientific treatise, and that the only additions to it were Galileo'a demonstration of Leonardo da Vinci's simple remark that the earth is a moon of the sun, Sir Humphrey Davy's invention of the safety lamp, the discovery of electricity, the application of steam to industrial purposes, and the penny post.

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

We educate one another; and we cannot do this if half of us consider the other half not good enough to talk to.

Every Englishman believes that Handel now occupies an important position in heaven. If so, le bon Dieu must feel toward him very much as Louis Treize felt toward Richelieu.

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

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

Only fools repeat the same things over and over, expecting to obtain different results.

Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.

The harder I work the more I live.

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching.

Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby

My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt.

The best bought-up children are those who have seen thier parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the first duty of a parent.

Like fingerprints, all marriages are different.

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

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.

Every girl has a right to be loved.

Hell is not all paved with bad intentions.

I don't want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

Unbounded hopes were placed on each successive extension of the electoral franchise, culminating in the enfranchisement of women.These hopes have been disappointed, because the voters, male and female, being politically untrained and uneducated, have (a) no grasp of constructive measures; (b) loathe taxation as such; (c) dislike being governed at all; and (d) dread and resent any extension of official interference as an encroachment on their personal liberty.

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.

Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.

There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage.

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it.