George Bernard Shaw Quotes

All young women begin by believing they can change and reform the men they marry. They can't.

Truth telling is not compatible with the defence of the realm.

What's the use of money if you have to earn it.

I really don't think I could consent to go to Heaven if I thought there were no animals there.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

Remember that I too am mortal.

When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder column.

I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettishness, without being either good business men or fine judges of literature.

The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

Financiers live in a world of illusion. They count on something which they call the capital of the country, which has no existence.

The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud.

Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.

I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capability to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age... I have studied him - the wonderful man, and in my opinion far from being an Anti-Christ he must be called the Saviour of Humanity.

My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative revolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice.

In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like the state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

Make money and the whole nation will conspire to call you a gentleman.

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

The Englishmen is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

What is both surprising and delightful is that the spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game...There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability.

People must not be forced to adopt me as their favourite author, even for their own good.

Eternal is the fact that the human creature born in Ireland and brought up in its air is Irish. I have lived for twenty years in Ireland and for seventy-two in England; but the twenty came first and in Britain I am still a foreigner and shall die one.

It is in the hour of trial that a man finds his true profession.

Once there was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time is called the Dark Ages. He who can, does. He who cannot teaches.

Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanginary execution after torture, for its central mystery is an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of equality and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance.

A vegetarian is not a person who lives on vegetables, any more than a Catholic is a person who lives on cats.

If pity is akin to love, gratitude is akin to the other thing.

Defeatism is the wretchedest of policies.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.

Alcohol is a very necessary article. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.

He who has never hoped can never despair

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. . . . It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.

From a very early age, I've had to interrupt my education to go to school.

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn't actually fall down.

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.