George Bernard Shaw Quotes

At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles and cuts off his king's head on republican principles.

The Anti-Vivisector does not deny that physiologists must make experiments and even take chances with new methods. He says that they must not seek knowledge by criminal methods, just as they must not make money by criminal methods. He does not object to Galileo dropping cannon balls from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa; but he would object to shoving off two dogs or American tourists.

We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment.

If you go to Heaven without being naturally qualified for it you will not enjoy yourself there.

Ladies and gentlemen are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom before morning.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.

Whenever an obviously well founded statement is made in England by a person specially well acquainted with the facts, that unlucky person is instantly and frantically contradicted by all the people who obviously know nothing about it.

The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization.

Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.

You know, Tolstoy, like myself, wasn't taken in by superstitions like science and medicine.

Reviewing has one advantage over suicide: in suicide you take it out on yourself; in reviewing you take it out on other people.

You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell: All hope abandon ye who enter here.

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God's hand, his brain as God's brain, his purpose as God's purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.

In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as 1 percent of us could give physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.

I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, ininvention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

There are two things necessary to Salvation.... Money and gunpowder.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.

Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid...There is no harm in a well-fed lion. It has no ideals, no sect, no party.

Telling the truth is the funniest joke in the world.

Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.

All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.

What is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.

People get nothing out of books but what they bring to them.

The 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

Well, upon my soul! You are not ashamed to stand there and confess yourself a disgusting drunkard.

Never repeat old grievances.

Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice

Newspaper : A device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

What use are cartridges in battle? I always carry chocolate instead.

In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.

When a man of normal habits is ill, everyone hastens to assure him that he is going to recover. When a vegetarian is ill (which fortunately very seldom happens), everyone assures him that he is going to die, and that they told him so, and that it serves him right. They implore him to take at least a little gravy, so as to give himself a chance of lasting out the night

Revolutionary moments attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.

Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.