George Bernard Shaw Quotes

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.

It is not the number of years we have behind us, but the number we have before us, that makes us careful and responsible and determined to find out the truth about everything.

Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries.

The theory that music has a depraving effect on morals has now been abandoned to the old women of both sexes.

Our lives are shaped not as much by our experiences as by our expectations.

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

In the arts of life main invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. ... There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons.

Grain by grain, a loaf. Stone upon stone, a palace.

Religion is a good invention in times of stress.

What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.

Better never than late.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool.

Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. If all economists were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion.

The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.

I was told that my diet was so poor that I could not repair the bones that were broken and operated on. So I have just had an Xradiograph taken; and lo! perfectly mended solid bone so beautifully white that I have left instructions that, if I die, a glove stretcher is to be made of me and sent to you as a souvenir

It is said that every people has the Government it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the electorate it deserves; for the orator of the front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant electorate at will.

Being a mother means that your heart is no longer yours; it wanders wherever your children do

Man is unique in that he has plans, purpose and goals which require the need for criteria of choice. The need for ethical value is within man whose future may largely be determined by the choice he make

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.

The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!

Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

That older and greater church to which I belong: the church where the oftener you laugh the better, because by laughter only can you destroy evil without malice

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief.

I want to be all used up when I die.

We're human beings we are - all of us - and that's what people are liable to forget. Human beings don't like peace and goodwill and everybody loving everybody else. However much they may think they do, they don't really because they're not made like that. Human beings love eating and drinking and loving and hating. They also like showing off, grabbing all they can, fighting for their rights and bossing anybody who'll give them half a chance.

The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all; it was Paul who converted the religion that has raised one man above sin and death.

A child hasn't a grown-up person's appetite for affection. A little of it goes a long way with them; and they like a good imitation of it better than the real thing, as every nurse knows.

My friend, when a man has anything to tell in this world, the difficulty is not to make him tell it, but to prevent him from telling it too often.

Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.

A man has no business to marry a woman who can't make him miserable. It means she can't make him happy.

We are not taught to think decently on sex subjects, and consequently we have no language for them except indecent language.

It has taken me nearly twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public; and I am not sure that I am not still regarded as a suspicious character in some quarters.

Who is this Baby Ruth? And what does she do?

I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns, as Johnson did, when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit

I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical.

Any belief worth having must survive doubt

Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?