George Bernard Shaw Quotes

The cinema is going to form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct, will be those of the film.

A genius is a person who is seeing further and probing deeper than other people has a different set of ethical valuations from their and has energy enough to give effect to this extra vision and its valuations in whatever manner best suits his or her

My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.

Think what cowards men would be if they had to bear children. Women are altogether a superior species.

Dancing is a very crude attempt to get into the rhythm of life.

In the right key one can say anything. In the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part is the establishment of the key.

Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.

It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something.

If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.

Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

When God created man and woman, he did not take a patent. That's why any imbecile has been able to do so ever since.

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

Not everybody is strong enough to endure life without an anesthetic. Drink probably averts more gross crime than it causes.

I'm sick of all the reasonable people: they see all the reasons for doing nothing

If you don't begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you area red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!

After studying the Hungarian language for years, I can confidently conclude that had Hungarian been my mother tongue, it would have been more precious. Simply because through this extraordinary, ancient and powerful language it is possible to precisely describe the tiniest differences and the most secretive tremors of emotions.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again, because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman's work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it.

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

Rebecca [West] can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely.

I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.

The notion that disarmament can put a stop to war is contradicted by the nearest dogfight.

It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.

We are all victims of the violence that animals suffer... their liberation is also our liberation.

Nobel Prize money is a life-belt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.

You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.

The British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding.

God has given us a world that nothing but our own folly keeps from being a paradise.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

When a bishop at the first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock round the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically... but that does not justify him in pretending...that Christ is, in effect, Mars.

The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.

A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there.

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.

Remember always that the least plain sister is the family beauty.

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Pothinus: "Is it possible that Caesar, the conqueror of the world, has time to occupy himself with such a trifle as our taxes?" Caesar: "My friend, taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.

I have never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from other men. There is not much harm in a lion. He has no ideals, no religion, no politics, no chivalry, no gentility; in short, no reason for destroying anything that he does not want to eat