When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, "The one I feed the most."
George Bernard ShawI am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blasphemous and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and anyone who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.
George Bernard ShawThe unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.
George Bernard ShawGo anywhere in England where there are natural wholesome, contented and really nice English people; and what do you find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.
George Bernard ShawOh, well, if you want original conversations, you'd better go and talk to yourself.
George Bernard ShawMarriage is tolerable enough in its way if youre easygoing and dont expect too much from it. But it doesnt bear thinking about.
George Bernard ShawIf you canโt appreciate what youโve got, youโd better get what you can appreciate.
George Bernard ShawIn a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.
George Bernard ShawNo child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor.
George Bernard ShawI find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.
George Bernard ShawThe great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience. He has to interpret life.
George Bernard ShawI make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going.
George Bernard ShawEvery man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist.
George Bernard ShawMake it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words 'Remember that I too am mortal'.
George Bernard ShawThe early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.
George Bernard ShawAbsolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.
George Bernard ShawWe all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry of our hearts.
George Bernard ShawYou propound a complicated arithmetical problem: say cubing a number containing four digits. Give me a slate and half an hour's time, and I can produce a wrong answer.
George Bernard ShawIt is nearly 50 years since I was assured by a conclave of doctors that if I did not eat meat I should die of starvation.
George Bernard ShawIn a hospital they throw you out into the street before you are half cured, but in a nursing home they don't let you out till you are dead.
George Bernard ShawWhat a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
George Bernard ShawEverybody who does not live in a prostitute's bed and on a diet of cocaine snow is called an ascetic nowadays.
George Bernard ShawIt is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.
George Bernard ShawChangeable women are more endurable that monotonous ones; they are sometimes murdered but never deserted.
George Bernard ShawDogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.
George Bernard ShawIn an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.
George Bernard ShawMoney is the counter that enables life to be lived socially; it is life as truly as sovereigns and banknotes are money.
George Bernard ShawYou may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.
George Bernard ShawPeople have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.
George Bernard Shaw