George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Sister, you're trying to keep me alive as an old curiosity, but I'm done, I'm finished, I'm going to die.

Not until he acquires European manners does the American anarchist become the gentleman who assures you that people cannot be mademoral by Act of Parliament (the truth being that it is only by Acts of Parliament that men in large communities can be made moral, even when they want to).

All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality conquers them.

I myself have been particularly careful never to say a civil word to the United States. I have scoffed at their inhabitants as a nation of villagers. I have defined the 100 % American as 99 % an idiot. And they adore me.

A thing that nobody believes cannot be proved too often.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.

I am the most spontaneous speaker in the world because every word, every gesture, and every retort has been carefully rehearsed.

Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse.

Youth is just wasted on young people.

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.

The test to which all methods of treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to doctors or not.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.

A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

If more than 10% of the people like a painting, you can be sure it's bad.

Shall I turn up the light for you? No, give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light.

Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

It is one of the mysterious ways of Allah to make women troublesome when he makes them beautiful.

Most married couples spend the whole day apart, the woman in the house, the man in the office or study or workshop.

The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.

Marry Ann; and at the end of a week you'll find no more inspiration in her than in a plate of muffins.

We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round. The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round. He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.

All progress depends upon the unreasonable person.

It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is wooed. That is how the spider waits for the fly.

Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks.

Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity, except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition.

At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox.

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.

I learned more from the first stupid woman who fell in love with me than ever my brains taught me.

Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter;but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!

What is life but a series of inspired follies.

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich-something for nothing.

The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.

All industries are brought under the control of such people [film producers] by Capitalism. If the capitalists let themselves be seduced from their pursuit of profits to the enchantments of art, they would be bankrupt before they knew where they were. You cannot combine the pursuit of money with the pursuit of art.

If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.

You will think less of the art, when you know the artist

The sex illusion is not a fixed quantity: not what mathematicians call a constant. It varies from zero in my wife's case to madness in that of our stepsister.

The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty . . . . Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys basic people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.

As well consult a butcher on the value of vegetarianism as a doctor on the worth of vaccination.

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.

Don't lose faith. Promise yourself that you will be a success story, and I promise you that all the forces of the universe will unite to come to your aid; you might not feel today or for a while, but the longer you wait the bigger the prize.

This planet is obviously being used as an insane asylum by other planets.

Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple. Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don't know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond.

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.