George Bernard Shaw Quotes

I assume that to prevent illness in later life, you should never have been born at all.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

Islam is the best religion and Muslims are the worst followers

Woman's happiness begins with her first love and ends about then

It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles.

What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

If you do not write for publication, there is little point in writing at all.

That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her.

As long as more people will pay admission to a theater to see a naked body than to see a naked brain, the drama will languish.

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.

The practical question, then, is what to do with the children. Tolerate them at home we will not. Let them run loose in the streets we dare not until our streets become safe places for children, which, to our utter shame, they are not at present, though they can hardly be worse than some homes and some schools.

As people get their opinions so largely from the newspapers they read, the corruption of the schools would not matter so much if the Press were free. But the Press is not free. As it costs at least a quarter of a million of money to establish a daily newspaper in London, the newspapers are owned by rich men. And they depend on the advertisements of other rich men. Editors and journalists who express opinions in print that are opposed to the interests of the rich are dismissed and replaced by subservient ones.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances.

There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.

I can't control what life did to me, but I can control how I react. Therein lies the difference.

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

Men trifle with their business and their politics but never trifle with their games. It brings truth home to them. They cannot pretend they have won when they have lost nor that they had a magnificent drive when they foozled it. The Englishman is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.

A serious illness or a death advertises the doctor exactly as a hanging advertises the barrister who defended the person hanged.

Sherlock Holmes was a drug addict without a single amiable trait.

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.

It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.

A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.

Deep knowledge is not knowledge of the thing itself, but knowledge of a thing like the thing. Then, you gain not one knowledge, but two knowledges. Of the thing. And of the original thing with is like the thing. Which is the barbarism of the privileged class.

New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

As you say, I am honoured and famous and rich. But as I have to do all the hard work, and suffer an increasing multitude of fools gladly, it does not feel any better than being reviled, infamous and poor, as I used to be.

What is the use of straining after an amiable view of things, when a cynical view is most likely to be the true one?.

NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier, Giuseppe? Everything he says is wrong. GIUSEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right.

If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman's pleasures can be, and mostly are, shared by his dog.

Men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

Women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men.

When commenting on the turmoil and disorder of the world, If the other planets are inhabited, they must be using this earth as their insane asylum.

People get tired of everything, and of nothing sooner than of what they most like.

He said that private practice in medicine ought to be put down by law. When I asked him why, he said that private doctors were ignorant licensed murders.