George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him. Even if I did not, I should pretend to; for a taste in his music is a mark of caste among musicians, and should be worn, like a tall hat, by the amateur who wishes to pass for a true Brahmin.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.

Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.

People always get tired of one another. I grow tired of myself whenever I am left alone for ten minutes, and I am certain that I am fonder of myself than anyone can be of another person.

What a heartbreaking job it is trying to combine authors for their own protection... the first lesson I learned was that when you take the field for the authors you will be safer without a breastplate than without a backplate.

The devil can quote Shakespeare for his own purpose.

If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative litt

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.

I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn anything from history.

For nearly twenty years I have been a published author... But I have never yet seen a book of mine offered for sale in a shop window.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.

Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination.

Morals are a luxury of the rich.

I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly feed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well.

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

Success covers a multitude of blunders.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

Hollywood keeps before its child audiences a string of glorified young heroes, everyone of whom is an unhesitating and violent Anarchist. His one answer to everything that annoys him or disparages his country or his parents or his young lady or his personal code of manly conduct is to give the offender a "sock" in the jaw.... My observation leads me to believe that it is not the virtuous people who are good at socking jaws.

A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.

When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.

The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.

Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best! . . . The reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete that everybody acts on strictly business principles.

Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment.

The chief objection to playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player.

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination.

English is the easiest language to speak badly.

Let no one suppose that the words doctor and patient can disguise from the parties the fact that they are employer and employee.

Nobody can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure time for freedom than unconventionality does.

Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.

People expect too much of one year and too little of ten.

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

The haughty American nation ... makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a bootblack.

A woman whose face looked as if it had been made of sugar and someone had licked it.

There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

If you demand my authorities for this and that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority.

My situation is a solemn one: life is offered to me on the condition of eating beefsteaks. But death is better than cannibalism. My will contains directions for my funeral, which will be followed, not by mourning coaches, but by oxen, sheep, flocks of poultry, and a small traveling aquarium of live fish, all wearing white scarves in honor of the man who perished rather than eat his fellow creatures. It will be, without the exception of Noah's Ark, the most remarkable thing of its kind ever seen.

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.

All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies.

Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend - if you have one. Telegram inviting Winston Churchill to opening night of Pygmalion. Churchill wired back: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second - if there is one.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.