George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.

I've posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin's Thinker, but I merely looked constipated.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.

To withhold deserved praise lest it should make its object conceited is as dishonest as to withhold payment of a just debt lest your creditor should spend the money badly.

Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place.

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everybody there looks an original. All other nations are obviously mass produced.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

I work as my father drank.

You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day's wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you.

The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

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.

I believe in the discipline of silence, and could talk for hours about it.

Every profession is a conspiracy against the laity.

Stop being Jews and start being human beings.

A man of genius is not a man who sees more than other men do. On the contrary, it is very often found that he is absentminded andobserves much less than other people.... Why is it that the public have such an exaggerated respect for him--after he is dead? The reason is that the man of genius understands the importance of the few things he sees.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.

The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

Medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common cure-mongering witchcraft

Bible worship, though at its best it may achieve sublimity by keeping its head in the skies, may also make itself both ridiculousand dangerous by having its feet off the ground.

I was always unlawful; I broke the law when I was born because my parents weren't married.

There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes.

I can't turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the voice and the face. They are not you.

Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.

There is a disease to which plays as well as men become liable with advancing years. In men it is called doting, in plays dating.The more topical the play the more it dates.

If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.

Worst of all, there is no sign of any relaxation of antisemitism. Logically it has nothing to do with Fascism. But the human raceis imitative rather than logical; and as Fascism spreads antisemitism spreads.

I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... if you have one.

We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing.

The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.

What God hath joined together no man shall put asunder: God will take care of that.

During the last considerable epidemic at the turn of the century, I was a member of the Health Committee of London Borough Council, and I learned how the credit of vaccination is kept up statistically by diagnosing all the revaccinated cases (of smallpox) as pustular eczema, varioloid or what not---except smallpox.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.

I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. . . . I tell you, gentlemen, if you can shew a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally.

The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.

Wise kings wear shabby clothes, and leave the gold lace to the drum major.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

God help England if she had no Scots to think for her.

You see things and you say, 'Why?'. But I dream things and I say, 'Why not?'.