Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.
George Bernard ShawThe lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.
George Bernard ShawThe secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.
George Bernard ShawHe who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.
George Bernard ShawTreat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.
George Bernard ShawI don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum
George Bernard ShawFine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.
George Bernard ShawRich men without convictions are more dangerous in modern society than poor women without chastity.
George Bernard ShawThe American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy; and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes.
George Bernard ShawLife is a disease; and the only difference between on man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.
George Bernard ShawThe thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.
George Bernard ShawIt is always necessary to overstate a cast startlingly to make people sit up and listen to it, and to frighten them into acting on it.
George Bernard ShawI do not want actors and actresses to understand my plays. That is not necessary. If they will only pronounce the correct sounds I can guarantee the results.
George Bernard ShawGreat art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
George Bernard ShawRevolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
George Bernard ShawEven if animal experimentation was proved to be of value, it would be morally wrong.
George Bernard ShawAn American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country.
George Bernard ShawWould the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?Making life means making trouble. Thereโs only one way of escaping trouble; and thatโs killing things.
George Bernard ShawYou see things; and you say, โWhy?โ But I dream things that never were; and I say, โWhy not?
George Bernard ShawChoose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
George Bernard ShawThe degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion.
George Bernard ShawAffection between adults - if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown up children - and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural.
George Bernard ShawWe don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.
George Bernard ShawOpera is when a tenor and soprano want to make love, but are prevented from doing so by a baritone.
George Bernard ShawExcept during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
George Bernard ShawThey tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this . . . because . . . I am a natural-born mountebank.
George Bernard ShawIf you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.
George Bernard ShawWe have in England a curious belief in first-rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable second-rateness of the people we do know.
George Bernard ShawIf we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else.
George Bernard ShawVery nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like. See?
George Bernard ShawYou have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
George Bernard ShawThe ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.
George Bernard ShawLive in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.
George Bernard ShawA doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.
George Bernard ShawThe great secret...is not having bad manners or good manners...but having the same manner for all human souls.
George Bernard Shaw