George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation.

Don't waste time collecting other people's autographs; rather devote it to making your own autograph worth collecting.

I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

The open mind never acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions.

I don't. I look my age; and I am my age. It is the other people who look older than they are. What can you expect from people who eat corpses and drink spirits?

The function of comedy is to dispelunconsciousness by turning the searchlight of the keenest moral and intellectual analysisright on to it.

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.

A soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.

I try to follow his example, not to imitate him.

All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins?

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce greatpoetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.

This is my father. Try what you can with him! He won't listen to me, because he remembers what a fool I was when I was a baby.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

It is well to be off with the old woman before you're on with the new.

Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.

A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another, all would be well with the world. I found when I tried to put that into practice, not only were other people seldom lovable but I wasn't very lovable myself.

Even to this day it is easier than it ought to be for me to get a rise out of an American by telling him something about himself which is equally true about every human being on the face of the globe. He at once resents this as a disparagement and an assertion on my part that people in other parts of the globe are not like that, and are loftily superior to such weaknesses.

I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That's right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That's democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.

The greatest thing in life is to die young - but delay it as long as possible.

To be a champion you must live like one.

I have studied him - the wonderful man - and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ he must be called the saviour of humanity.

The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else.

If associations to control burglary and murder were tolerated we should take it for granted that the members should all be burglers and murderers.

I like to quote myself frequently and often, it makes me sound much more intelligent than I actually am.

No doubt it is easy to demostrate that property will destroy society unless society destroys it.

Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out.

Female murderers get sheaves of offers of marriage.

All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake. Not that it's wrong to try to improve the world if you know how but simply because struggling and striving are the worst possible ways to go about doing anything!

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.

What is self-control? It is nothing but a highly developed vital sense, dominating and regulating the mere appetites. To overlook the very existence of this supreme sense; to miss the obvious inference that it is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive.

Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.