George Bernard Shaw Quotes

The sound body is the product of the sound mind.

It is the highest creatures who take the longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity.

A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor.

When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

Girls, like men, want to be petted, pitied, and made much of, when they are diffident, in low spirits, or in unrequited love. These are services which the weak cannot render to the strong and which the strong will not render to the weak, except when there is also a difference of sex.

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

You have nothing to do but mention the quantum theory, and people will take your voice for the voice of science, and belive anything.

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Revelations: A curious record of the visions of a drug addict.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions.

How you ought properly to spell 'fish' in English: 'goti' .

Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measuresby results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice.

I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul.

Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from their riches. They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position; they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and do useful work. But this means that they do not live like rich people at all, and might therefore just as well have ordinary incomes.

The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.

I wish people would stop talking about my birthday.

Literature is like any other trade; you will never sell anything unless you go to the right shop.

The buried truth germinates and breaks through to the light.

Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.

The confusing of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.

Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.

Hell is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

The only sensible person is my tailor. He measures me anew each time he sees me.

I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads off and keep them in bowls of water around the house.

All progress is due to the unreasonable person.

I don't know what to say about this book. The experience on which it is founded is so extraordinary, that an honest record of it should be preserved . . . But it would have driven me mad; and I am not sure that the author came out of it without a slight derangement.

Trade unionism is not socialism. It is the capitalism of the proletariat.

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every private employer a dictator, every financier a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at his mercy, and no public responsibility.

Style is effectiveness of assertion.

Don't wait for the right opportunity: create it.

When you find something funny search it for hidden truth.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.

Some persons, by hating vice too much, come to love men too little. Hatred is self-punishment. Hatred is the cowards revenge for being intimidated.

Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.

The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.

Morality is not respectability.

Who are those we love? Only those we do not hate.

Heartbreak is life educating us.

Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

Assasination on the scaffold is the worst form of assasination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.

But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a person's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.

Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentlemen.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.