Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men.
George Bernard ShawMy father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately
George Bernard ShawBut whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.
George Bernard ShawYou must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world, who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there and say Sir, or Madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can't justify your existence, if you're not pulling your weight in the social boat, if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then, clearly, we cannot use the organizations of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself.
George Bernard ShawIt is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.
George Bernard ShawLet wife and child perish, and lay bricks for your last crust, rather than part with an iota of your [copy]rights.
George Bernard ShawA man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her.
George Bernard ShawThe sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation.
George Bernard ShawAll my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
George Bernard ShawYou can easily find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy
George Bernard ShawVegetarians claim to be immune from most diseases but they have been known to die from time to time.
George Bernard ShawTo disbelieve in marriage is easy: to love a married woman is easy; but to betray a comrade, to be disloyal to a host, to break the covenant of bread and salt, is impossible.
George Bernard ShawThe seven deadly sins... food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.
George Bernard ShawI sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else.
George Bernard ShawEnglishmen never will be slaves; they are free to do whatever the government and public opinion allow them.
George Bernard ShawThough the Life Force supplies us with its own purpose, it has no other brains to work with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads.
George Bernard ShawOur prejudices are so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.
George Bernard ShawYou don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you? . . . If it's by a good author, it's a good play, naturally. That stands to reason.
George Bernard ShawUntil the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.
George Bernard ShawYou can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.
George Bernard ShawThere is no accomplishment so easy to acquire as politeness and none more profitable.
George Bernard ShawNietzche . . . he was a confirmed Life Force worshipper. It was he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus; and the 20th century will run after this newest of the old crazes when it gets tired of the world, the flesh, and your humble servant.
George Bernard ShawThe moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it ... If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?
George Bernard ShawWe are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself.
George Bernard ShawThe medieval doctors of divinity who did not pretend to settle how many angels could dance on the point of a needle cut a very poor figure as far as romantic credulity is concerned beside the modern physicists who have settled to the billionth of a millimetre every movement and position in the dance of the electrons. Not for worlds would I question the precise accuracy of these calculations or the existence of electrons (whatever they may be). The fate of Joan is a warning to me against such heresy.
George Bernard ShawI don't like the idea of killing my fellow creatures in order to eat their dead bodies.
George Bernard ShawI must remind you that our credulity is not to be measured by the truth of the things we believe. When men believed that the earthwas flat, they were not credulous: they were using their common sense, and, if asked to prove that the earth was flat, would have said simply, "Look at it." Those who refuse to believe that it is round are exercising a wholesome skepticism.
George Bernard ShawIf you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.
George Bernard ShawTo make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy. To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy.
George Bernard ShawWe cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them.
George Bernard ShawI loathe the mess of mean superstitions and misunderstood prophecies which is still rammed down the throats of children under the name of Christianity.
George Bernard Shaw