George Bernard Shaw Quotes

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could.

Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.

Be as romantic as you please about love ... but you mustn't be romantic about money.

Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.

The danger of crippling thought, the danger of obstructing the formation of the public mind by specially suppressing ... representations is far greater than any real danger that there is from such representations.

Most of my recent plays were written in the railway train between Hatfield and Kings Cross. I write anywhere, on the top of omnibuses or wherever I may be; it is all the same to me.

The 100% American is 99% idiot.

I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

The capacity of any conqueror is more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary.

We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.

Hate is the revenge of a coward intimidated.

The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.

You sometimes have to answer a woman according to her womanliness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his folly.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.

Of the two lots, the woman's lot of perpetual motherhood, and the man's of perpetual babyhood, I prefer the man's.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

All sorts of bodily diseases are produced by half-used minds.

The person I miss most is the one I could have been.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.

A family is a tyranny ruled over by it's weakest member.

What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.

We are told that when Jehovah created the world he saw that it was good what would he say now

Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth?

My way of joking is to tell the truth

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

The trouble with the media is that it seems unable to distinguish between the end of the world and a bicycle accident.

Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you.

I am a sort of collector of religions: and the curious thing is that I find I can believe in them all.

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.

But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

What I say today everybody will say tomorrow, though they will not remember who put it into their heads. Indeed they will be right for I never remember who puts things into my head : it is the Zeitgeist.

While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: "To ----, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw." He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.

I am highly susceptible to the force of all truly religious music, especially to the music of my own church, the church of Shelley, Michelangelo, and Beethoven.

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

If there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It's in the nature of governments to tell lies.

Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.

I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Patriotism is a word which always commemorates a robbery.

Unless the law of marriage were first made human, it could never become divine.

Stimulate the phagocytes.

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.