No severity of punishment deters when detection is uncertain, as it always must be.
George Bernard ShawLife at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.
George Bernard ShawAssassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.
George Bernard ShawWhat we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.
George Bernard ShawMake me a beautiful word for doing things tomorrow; for that surely is a great and blessed invention.
George Bernard ShawThe mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth.
George Bernard ShawWe are the living graves of murdered beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our appetites. How can we hope in this world to attain the peace we say we are so anxious for?
George Bernard ShawPerhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final.
George Bernard ShawThere is at bottom only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate the phagocytes.
George Bernard ShawKeep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.
George Bernard ShawWicked people means people who have no love: therefore, they have no shame. They have the power to ask love because the don't need it: they have the power to offer it because they have none to give.
George Bernard ShawWith the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.
George Bernard ShawWe know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
George Bernard ShawThe more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.
George Bernard ShawIt is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
George Bernard ShawI showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.
George Bernard ShawDo not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
George Bernard ShawWar can so easily be gilt with romance and heroism and solemn national duty and patriotism and the like by persons whose superficial literary and oratorical talent covers an abyss of Godforsaken folly.
George Bernard ShawThere is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous.
George Bernard ShawIf all the statisticians in the world were laid head to toe, they wouldn't be able to reach a conclusion
George Bernard ShawIt is ridiculous to say that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is that the artist's business is not that of the policeman.
George Bernard ShawI have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.
George Bernard Shaw[...] any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.
George Bernard ShawA Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.
George Bernard ShawYou're only a beginner; and what you think is love, and interest, and all that, is not real love at all: three quarters of it is only unsatisfied curiosity.
George Bernard ShawA man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.
George Bernard ShawA newspaper, not having to act on its descriptions and reports, but only to sell them to idly curious people, has nothing but honor to lose by inaccuracy and non-veracity.
George Bernard ShawWe are compelled by the theory of God's already achieved perfection to make Him a devil as well as a god, because of the existenceof evil. The god of love, if omnipotent and omniscient, must be the god of cancer and epilepsy as well.... Whoever admits that anything living is evil must either believe that God is malignantly capable of creating evil, or else believe that God has made many mistakes in His attempts to make a perfect being.
George Bernard ShawChristmas is forced upon 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.
George Bernard ShawTwo people getting together to write a book is like three people getting together to have a baby. One of them is superfluous.
George Bernard ShawYou do not settle whether an argument is justified by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments but between barbarous and civilized behaviour. Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.
George Bernard ShawMurder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.
George Bernard ShawHe who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him
George Bernard ShawI wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.
George Bernard Shaw