George Bernard Shaw Quotes

We have collected and put the best George Bernard Shaw quotes in the following categories. Enjoy reading these insights and feel free to share this page on your social media to inspire others.

May these George Bernard Shaw quotes on many subjects inspire you to never give up and keep working towards your goals. Who knows—success could be just around the corner.

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902)  Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

‘Do you know what a pessimist is’
‘A man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.’ – George Bernard Shaw

ADAM: There is something that holds us together, something that has no word
THE SERPENT: Love. Love. Love.
ADAM: That is too short a word for so long a thing. – George Bernard Shaw

PICKERING: Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?
HIGGINS [moodily]:Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned? – George Bernard Shaw

PICKERING: Have you no morals, man
DOOLITTLE: Can’t afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me. – George Bernard Shaw

SWINDON: What will history say
BURGOYNE: History, sir, will tell lies as usual. – George Bernard Shaw

THE CAPTAIN: A martyr, Lavinia, is a fool. Your death will prove nothing.
LAVINIA: Then why kill me? – George Bernard Shaw

MENDOZA: I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich.
TANNER: I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor. – George Bernard Shaw

WOMAN to SHAW: You have the greatest brain in the world, and I have the most beautiful body; so we ought to produce the most perfect child.
SHAW: What if the child inherits my body and your brains. – George Bernard Shaw

Short And Famous George Bernard Shaw Quotes

A happy family is but an earlier heaven. – George Bernard Shaw

A learned man is an idler who kills time by study. – George Bernard Shaw

A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith. – George Bernard Shaw

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell. – George Bernard Shaw

After all, the wrong road always leads somewhere. – George Bernard Shaw

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous. – George Bernard Shaw

All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity. – George Bernard Shaw

All great truths begin as blasphemies. – George Bernard Shaw

All professions are conspiracies against the laity. – George Bernard Shaw

All progress depends on the unreasonable man. – George Bernard Shaw

All progress means war with Society. – George Bernard Shaw

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable. – George Bernard Shaw

An index is a great leveller. – George Bernard Shaw

An Irishman’s heart is nothing but his imagination. – George Bernard Shaw

Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you. – George Bernard Shaw

Animals are my friends, and I don’t eat my friends. – George Bernard Shaw

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny. – George Bernard Shaw

Better never than late. – George Bernard Shaw

Beware of the man whose God is in the skies. – George Bernard Shaw

Common people do not pray; they only beg. – George Bernard Shaw

Common sense is instinct. Enough of it is genius. – George Bernard Shaw

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire. – George Bernard Shaw

Decency is Indecency’s Conspiracy of Silence. – George Bernard Shaw

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. – George Bernard Shaw

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed. – George Bernard Shaw

Does it occur to you, that the girl has some feelings? – George Bernard Shaw

Don’t wait for the right opportunity: create it. – George Bernard Shaw

English is the easiest language to speak badly. – George Bernard Shaw

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes. – George Bernard Shaw

Every man over forty is a scoundrel. – George Bernard Shaw

Everything is possible: everything. – George Bernard Shaw

Experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn. – George Bernard Shaw

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics. – George Bernard Shaw

General consultant to mankind. – George Bernard Shaw

Gin was mother’s milk to her. – George Bernard Shaw

God is on the side of the big battalions. – George Bernard Shaw

Greatness is one of the sensations of littleness. – George Bernard Shaw

Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby. – George Bernard Shaw

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated. – George Bernard Shaw

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches. – George Bernard Shaw

He who has never hoped can never despair. – George Bernard Shaw

Heartbreak is life educating us. – George Bernard Shaw

Heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation. – George Bernard Shaw

Hell is full of musical amateurs. – George Bernard Shaw

Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse. – George Bernard Shaw

I absolutely forbid any such outrage. – George Bernard Shaw

I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist. – George Bernard Shaw

I am a Millionaire. That is my religion. – George Bernard Shaw

I can’t talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes. – George Bernard Shaw

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad. – George Bernard Shaw

I do not know what I think until I write it. – George Bernard Shaw

I don’t want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady. – George Bernard Shaw

I never expect a soldier to think. – George Bernard Shaw

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation. – George Bernard Shaw

I want to be all used up when I die. – George Bernard Shaw

I’m an atheist and I thank God for it. – George Bernard Shaw

I’m only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller. – George Bernard Shaw

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion. – George Bernard Shaw

If parents would only realize how they bore their children! – George Bernard Shaw

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well dance with it. – George Bernard Shaw

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves. – George Bernard Shaw

If you teach a man anything, he will never learn. – George Bernard Shaw

If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh or they’ll kill you. – George Bernard Shaw

Imagination is the beginning of creation. – George Bernard Shaw

In heaven, an angel is no one in particular. – George Bernard Shaw

In the arts of peace man is a bungler. – George Bernard Shaw

In this world, there is always danger for those who are afraid of it. – George Bernard Shaw

Islam is the best religion and Muslims are the worst followers. – George Bernard Shaw

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid. – George Bernard Shaw

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics. – George Bernard Shaw

It was a silly notion: the whole thing has been a bore. – George Bernard Shaw

It was from Handel that I learned that style consists in force of assertion. – George Bernard Shaw

It’s easier to replace a dead man than a good picture. – George Bernard Shaw

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right. – George Bernard Shaw

It’s all right: he’s a gentleman: look at his boots. – George Bernard Shaw

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination. – George Bernard Shaw

Lack of money is the root of all evil. – George Bernard Shaw

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it. – George Bernard Shaw

Life is a first draft… with NO rewrite. – George Bernard Shaw

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself. – George Bernard Shaw

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long. – George Bernard Shaw

Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability. – George Bernard Shaw

My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion. – George Bernard Shaw

My reputation grows with every failure. – George Bernard Shaw

My specialty is being right when other people are wrong. – George Bernard Shaw

No Englishman is ever fairly beaten. – George Bernard Shaw

Nobody could stand an eternity of heaven. – George Bernard Shaw

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious. – George Bernard Shaw

Oh, you are a very poor soldier – chocolate cream soldier! – George Bernard Shaw

One touch of Darwin makes the whole world kin. – George Bernard Shaw

Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless. – George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it. – George Bernard Shaw

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes. – George Bernard Shaw

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn. – George Bernard Shaw

Silence is the perfect expression of scorn. – George Bernard Shaw

So don’t let us quarrel, my girl. You shall not be made to suffer any more. – George Bernard Shaw

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English. – George Bernard Shaw

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. – George Bernard Shaw

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. – George Bernard Shaw

The customs of your tribe are not laws of nature. – George Bernard Shaw

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules. – George Bernard Shaw

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves. – George Bernard Shaw

The person I miss most is the one I could have been. – George Bernard Shaw

The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure. – George Bernard Shaw

The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react. – George Bernard Shaw

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing. – George Bernard Shaw

The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people. – George Bernard Shaw

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses. – George Bernard Shaw

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. – George Bernard Shaw

To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer. – George Bernard Shaw

Tradition will accustom people to any atrocity. – George Bernard Shaw

Very few people can afford to be poor. – George Bernard Shaw

Virtue is insufficient temptation. – George Bernard Shaw

War does not decide who is right but who is left. – George Bernard Shaw

We are a nation of governesses. – George Bernard Shaw

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. – George Bernard Shaw

We must reform society before we can reform ourselves. – George Bernard Shaw

What is life but a series of inspired follies? – George Bernard Shaw

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married. – George Bernard Shaw

When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth. – George Bernard Shaw

Whisky is liquid sunshine. – George Bernard Shaw

Wot prawce Selvytion nah. – George Bernard Shaw

Write your Sad times in Sand, Write your Good times in Stone. – George Bernard Shaw

You cannot be a hero without being a coward. – George Bernard Shaw

You’re not a man, you’re a machine. – George Bernard Shaw

Youth is wasted on the young. – George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw Quotes On Different Subjects

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income. – George Bernard Shaw

A cigarette is a pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool at the other. – George Bernard Shaw

A day’s work is a day’s work, neither more nor less, and the man who does it needs a day’s sustenance, a night’s repose and due leisure, whether he be painter or ploughman. – George Bernard Shaw

A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned. – George Bernard Shaw

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic. – George Bernard Shaw

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. – George Bernard Shaw

A genius can’t be forced; nor can you make an ape an alderman. – George Bernard Shaw

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out. – George Bernard Shaw

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. – George Bernard Shaw

A great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On. – George Bernard Shaw

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him. – George Bernard Shaw

A man of great common sense and good taste – meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage. – George Bernard Shaw

A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception. – George Bernard Shaw

A man’s interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. – George Bernard Shaw

A man’s own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world. – George Bernard Shaw

A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows. – George Bernard Shaw

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected. – George Bernard Shaw

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most. – George Bernard Shaw

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it. – George Bernard Shaw

A socialist is somebody who doesn’t have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody. – George Bernard Shaw

A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation – or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays – is like a blind man’s dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place. – George Bernard Shaw

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes. – George Bernard Shaw

All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships. – George Bernard Shaw

All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it. – George Bernard Shaw

All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense. – George Bernard Shaw

Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend – if you have one. – George Bernard Shaw

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them. – George Bernard Shaw

An actress is not a lady; at least, when she is, she is not an actress. – George Bernard Shaw

An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country. – George Bernard Shaw

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America. – George Bernard Shaw

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

An Englishman does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles. – George Bernard Shaw

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only being uncomfortable. – George Bernard Shaw

Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool. – George Bernard Shaw

Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. – George Bernard Shaw

As well consult a butcher on the value of vegetarianism as a doctor on the worth of vaccination. – George Bernard Shaw

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship. – George Bernard Shaw

At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox. – George Bernard Shaw

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended. – George Bernard Shaw

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days? – George Bernard Shaw

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

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million. – George Bernard Shaw

Beware of false knowledge, it is more dangerous than ignorance. – George Bernard Shaw

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself. – George Bernard Shaw

Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute. – George Bernard Shaw

But no public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means; and I have no reason to hope that Mr Coote may be an exception to the rule.

Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

Chess … a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.

Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

Christianity as a specific doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and utterly. He was hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you please) before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the level of the thing it has remained ever since. – George Bernard Shaw

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

Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art. – George Bernard Shaw

Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. ‘A miracle a minute’ would not be a bad slogan for God. – George Bernard Shaw

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men. – George Bernard Shaw

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn’t really hurt. – George Bernard Shaw

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom. – George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. – George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. – George Bernard Shaw

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few. – George Bernard Shaw

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices. – George Bernard Shaw

Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. – George Bernard Shaw

Do not fight with pigs – you will be smeared in mud but the pig will like it. – George Bernard Shaw

Do not waste your time on social questions. What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness. – George Bernard Shaw

Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about They are more true: they are the only things that are true. – George Bernard Shaw

Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great. – George Bernard Shaw

Don’t order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple… Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don’t know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond. – George Bernard Shaw

Don’t lose faith. Promise yourself that you will be a success story, and I promise you that all the forces of the universe will unite to come to your aid; you might not feel today or for a while, but the longer you wait the bigger the prize. – George Bernard Shaw

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing – a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces. – George Bernard Shaw

England and America are two countries divided by the same language. – George Bernard Shaw

England and America are two countries separated by a common language. – George Bernard Shaw

Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allows them to do. – George Bernard Shaw

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

Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say ‘No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.’ – George Bernard Shaw

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it. – George Bernard Shaw

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does. – George Bernard Shaw

Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned? – George Bernard Shaw

Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen. – George Bernard Shaw

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious. – George Bernard Shaw

Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week. – George Bernard Shaw

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare. – George Bernard Shaw

For liver the only place is Vichy, where you drink the water straight out of the ground in yellow glasses before it has time to lose its radioactivity or whatever else its secret may be. The bottled water is quite useless. – George Bernard Shaw

Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness. – George Bernard Shaw

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature! – George Bernard Shaw

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich – something for nothing. – George Bernard Shaw

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he’ll never stop to trouble about whether he’s happy or not. – George Bernard Shaw

Go anywhere in England where there are natural wholesome, contented and really nice English people; and what do you find? That the stables are the real centre of the household. – George Bernard Shaw

Go on writing plays, my boy, One of these days one of these London producers will go into his office and say to his secretary, Is there a play from Shaw this morning? and when she says, No, he will say, Well, then we’ll have to start on the rubbish. And that’s your chance, my boy. – George Bernard Shaw

He is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature. – George Bernard Shaw

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career. – George Bernard Shaw

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That clearly points to a political career. – George Bernard Shaw

He [The Briton] is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature. – George Bernard Shaw

He’s a man of great common sense and good taste – meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage. – George Bernard Shaw

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history. – George Bernard Shaw

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. – George Bernard Shaw

Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

He’s no right to take away my character. My character is the same to me as any lady’s. – George Bernard Shaw

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms. – George Bernard Shaw

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid. – George Bernard Shaw

Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good. – George Bernard Shaw

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

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen. – George Bernard Shaw

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize. – George Bernard Shaw

I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them. – George Bernard Shaw

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 a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind. – George Bernard Shaw

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while. – George Bernard Shaw

I had not achieved a success; but I provoked an uproar; and the sensation was so agreeable that I resolved to try again. – George Bernard Shaw

I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation. – George Bernard Shaw

I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats. – George Bernard Shaw

I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for – scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself. – George Bernard Shaw

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot. – George Bernard Shaw

I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self. – George Bernard Shaw

I hear you say “Why?” Always “Why?” You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?” – George Bernard Shaw

I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow’s feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong. – George Bernard Shaw

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

I like a bit of a mongrel myself, whether it’s a man or a dog; they’re the best for every day. – George Bernard Shaw

I must remind you that our credulity is not to be measured by the truth of the things we believe. When men believed that the earth was flat, they were not credulous: they were using their common sense, and, if asked to prove that the earth was flat, would have said simply, ‘Look at it.’ Those who refuse to believe that it is round are exercising a wholesome skepticism. – George Bernard Shaw

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

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people. – George Bernard Shaw

I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will. – George Bernard Shaw

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual way – by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could. – George Bernard Shaw

I sold flowers. I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of me I’m not fit to sell anything else. – George Bernard Shaw

I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community. – George Bernard Shaw

I was quite frightened once or twice because Eliza was doing it so well. You see, lots of the real people can’t do it at all: they’re such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. – George Bernard Shaw

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence. – George Bernard Shaw

I’m not a teacher: only a fellow-traveller of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you. – George Bernard Shaw

I’m only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don’t like beer. – George Bernard Shaw

I’ve posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin’s Thinker, but I merely looked constipated. – George Bernard Shaw

I, who said forty years ago that we should have had Socialism already but for the Socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing. – George Bernard Shaw

If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion. – George Bernard Shaw

If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains. – George Bernard Shaw

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience! – George Bernard Shaw

If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it. – George Bernard Shaw

If it could be proved today that not one of the miracles of Jesus actually occurred, that proof would not invalidate a single one of his didactic utterances; and conversely, if it could be proved that not only did the miracles actually occur, but that he had wrought a thousand other miracles a thousand times more wonderful, not a jot of weight would be added to his doctrine. – George Bernard Shaw

If Pygmalion is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary. – George Bernard Shaw

If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a footrule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved. – George Bernard Shaw

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do. – George Bernard Shaw

If women were particular about men’s characters, they would never get married at all. – George Bernard Shaw

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’ rateur, or a musical confectioner, or a painter of fans with cupids and cocottes. Handel had power. – George Bernard Shaw

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance. – George Bernard Shaw

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. – George Bernard Shaw

If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate. – George Bernard Shaw

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas. – George Bernard Shaw

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters. – George Bernard Shaw

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

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you. – George Bernard Shaw

If you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just what you like. – George Bernard Shaw

If you’re going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you. – George Bernard Shaw

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

Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery; it’s the sincerest form of learning. – George Bernard Shaw

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it’s more dangerous to lose than to win. – George Bernard Shaw

In an ugly and unhappy world, the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness. – George Bernard Shaw

In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win. – George Bernard Shaw

In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present. – George Bernard Shaw

In the case of a work which is a mere exhibition of skill in conventional art, there may be some excuse for the delusion that the longer the artist works on it the nearer he will bring it to perfection. Yet even the victims of this delusion must see that there is an age limit to the process, and that though a man of forty-five may improve the workmanship of a man of thirty-five, it does not follow that a man of fifty-five can do the same. – George Bernard Shaw

In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage. – George Bernard Shaw

Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth. – George Bernard Shaw

It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact. – George Bernard Shaw

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace. – George Bernard Shaw

It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

It is fortunate to come of distinguished ancestry. – It is not less so to be such that people do not care to inquire whether you are of high descent or not. – George Bernard Shaw

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

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. – George Bernard Shaw

It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date. – George Bernard Shaw

It’s so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right. – George Bernard Shaw

I’d like to kill you, you selfish brute. Why didn’t you leave me where you picked me out of—in the gutter? You thank God it’s all over, and that now you can throw me back again there, do you? – George Bernard Shaw

I’m glad he’s hungry. Not that I want him to suffer, poor chap! But then he’ll enjoy eating me much more. There’s a cheerful side to everything. – George Bernard Shaw

I’m not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you. – George Bernard Shaw

I’m one of the undeserving poor…up agen middle-class morality all the time…What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. – George Bernard Shaw

I’m only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. – George Bernard Shaw

I’m willing to tell you. I’m wanting to tell you. I’m waiting to tell you. – George Bernard Shaw

I’ve taught scores of American millionairesses how to speak English: the best looking women in the world. I’m seasoned. They might as well be blocks of wood. I might as well be a block of wood. – George Bernard Shaw

Just as the liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent. – George Bernard Shaw

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness. – George Bernard Shaw

Kings are not born: they are made by universal hallucination. – George Bernard Shaw

Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols or bombs without incurring any penalties. – George Bernard Shaw

Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

Manners are more important than laws and upon them, to a great deal, the law depends. – George Bernard Shaw

Martyrdom… is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability. – George Bernard Shaw

Marx’s Kapital is not a treatise on socialism; it is a gerrymand against the bourgeoisie. It was supposed to be written for the working class, but the working man respects the bourgeoisie and wants to be a bourgeoisie. Marx never got a hold of him for a moment. It was the revolting sons of the bourgeoisie itself, like myself, that painted the flag red. The middle and upper classes are the revolutionary element in society. The proletariat is the conservative element. – George Bernard Shaw

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. – George Bernard Shaw

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. – George Bernard Shaw

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis. – George Bernard Shaw

Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness. – George Bernard Shaw

Most people do not pray; they only beg. – George Bernard Shaw

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

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably. – George Bernard Shaw

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity. – George Bernard Shaw

My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion. – George Bernard Shaw

My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I’m a free citizen. – George Bernard Shaw

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world. – George Bernard Shaw

Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results. If Man will not serve, Nature will try another experiment. – George Bernard Shaw

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him. – George Bernard Shaw

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run. – George Bernard Shaw

Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

Newspaper: A device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilization. – George Bernard Shaw

No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman is Solon, the least confused thinker is Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot. – George Bernard Shaw

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means. – George Bernard Shaw

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect. – George Bernard Shaw

No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means. – George Bernard Shaw

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious. – George Bernard Shaw

No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus. – George Bernard Shaw

No, really: I can’t fight, I never could. I can’t bring myself to dislike anyone enough. – George Bernard Shaw

Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman. – George Bernard Shaw

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

Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think. – George Bernard Shaw

Now that we have learned to fly in the air like birds and dive in the sea like fish, only one thing remains – to learn to live on earth like humans. – George Bernard Shaw

Now that we have learned to fly the air like birds, swim underwater like fish, we lack one thing – to learn to live on earth as human beings. – George Bernard Shaw

Oh, well, if you want original conversations, you’d better go and talk to yourself. – George Bernard Shaw

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world. – George Bernard Shaw

On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creator’s hand. – George Bernard Shaw

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t. – George Bernard Shaw

Only fools repeat the same things over and over, expecting to obtain different results. – George Bernard Shaw

Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity, except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition. – George Bernard Shaw

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children. – George Bernard Shaw

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it… – George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it – George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism: Your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it. – George Bernard Shaw

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous – George Bernard Shaw

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them. – George Bernard Shaw

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them. – George Bernard Shaw

People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it. – George Bernard Shaw

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. – George Bernard Shaw

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. – George Bernard Shaw

Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing. – George Bernard Shaw

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power. – George Bernard Shaw

Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones. – George Bernard Shaw

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. – George Bernard Shaw

Property is organized robbery. – George Bernard Shaw

Put an Irishman on the spit, and you can always get another Irishman to turn him. – George Bernard Shaw

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad. – George Bernard Shaw

Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her. – George Bernard Shaw

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people. – George Bernard Shaw

Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders. – George Bernard Shaw

Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad. – George Bernard Shaw

Revolutionary movements attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them. – George Bernard Shaw

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny. They have only shifted it to another shoulder. – George Bernard Shaw

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal. – George Bernard Shaw

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more. – George Bernard Shaw

Scratch an Englishman and find a Protestant. – George Bernard Shaw

She had become attached to you both. She worked very hard for you, Henry! I don’t think you quite realize what anything in the nature of brain work means to a girl like that. Well, it seems that when the great day of trial came, and she did this wonderful thing for you without making a single mistake, you two sat there and never said a word to her, but talked together of how glad you were that it was all over and how you had been bored with the whole thing. And then you were surprised because she threw your slippers at you! – George Bernard Shaw

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech. – George Bernard Shaw

Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer. – George Bernard Shaw

Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population. – George Bernard Shaw

Socialists must be in favor of an aristocratic form of government. We must have the best men for the job . . . In the dictator you must have a man who has not only the power to govern but the force of character to impose himself as dictator whether you like him or not. – George Bernard Shaw

Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward’s art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm’s way when you are weak. That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms. – George Bernard Shaw

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. – George Bernard Shaw

Some people look at the world and say ‘why?’ Some people look at the world and say ‘why not?’ – George Bernard Shaw

Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive. – George Bernard Shaw

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time. – George Bernard Shaw

Syllables govern the world. – George Bernard Shaw

Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there. – George Bernard Shaw

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office. – George Bernard Shaw

The censorship method … is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient. – George Bernard Shaw

The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error. – George Bernard Shaw

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. – George Bernard Shaw

The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men. – George Bernard Shaw

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. – George Bernard Shaw

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality, and by no means a necessity of life. – George Bernard Shaw

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier. – George Bernard Shaw

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. – George Bernard Shaw

The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it ‘cease to do evil: learn to do well’; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it. – George Bernard Shaw

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things. – George Bernard Shaw

The goal of an artist is to create the definitive work that cannot be surpassed. – George Bernard Shaw

The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it. – George Bernard Shaw

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another. – George Bernard Shaw

The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty…our first duty – a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed – is not to be poor. – George Bernard Shaw

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic. – George Bernard Shaw

The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider! – George Bernard Shaw

The liar’s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else. – George Bernard Shaw

The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time. – George Bernard Shaw

The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum. – George Bernard Shaw

The man who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her. – George Bernard Shaw

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time. – George Bernard Shaw

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man. – George Bernard Shaw

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong. – George Bernard Shaw

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

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine. – George Bernard Shaw

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. – George Bernard Shaw

The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older. – George Bernard Shaw

The most original moralist at present in England, to the best of [his] knowledge, was Alfred Doolittle, a common dustman. – George Bernard Shaw

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor. – George Bernard Shaw

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years. – George Bernard Shaw

The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last. – George Bernard Shaw

The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person. – George Bernard Shaw

The one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man. – George Bernard Shaw

The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man. – George Bernard Shaw

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them. – George Bernard Shaw

The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me. – George Bernard Shaw

The only person who acts sensibly is my tailor. He takes my measure anew every time he sees me. Everyone else goes by their old measurements. – George Bernard Shaw

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself. – George Bernard Shaw

The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school. – George Bernard Shaw

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not. – George Bernard Shaw

The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can’t find them, make them. – George Bernard Shaw

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. – George Bernard Shaw

The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment’s reflection will shew that this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the shedding of blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacrifice and expiation. – George Bernard Shaw

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don’t want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve. – George Bernard Shaw

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas. – George Bernard Shaw

The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary. rather tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven and making a prolonged and intolerable noise. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world. – George Bernard Shaw

The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown. – George Bernard Shaw

The salvation of the world depends on the men who will not take evil good-humouredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him. – George Bernard Shaw

The salvation of the world depends on the men whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him. – George Bernard Shaw

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness. – George Bernard Shaw

The seriousness of throwing over hell whilst still clinging to the Atonement is obvious. If there is no punishment for sin there can be no self-forgiveness for it. If Christ paid our score, and if there is no hell and therefore no chance of our getting into trouble by forgetting the obligation, then we can be as wicked as we like with impunity inside the secular law, even from self-reproach, which becomes mere ingratitude to the Savior. On the other hand, if Christ did not pay our score, it still stands against us; and such debts make us extremely uncomfortable. The drive of evolution, which we call conscience and honor, seizes on such slips, and shames us to the dust for being so low in the scale as to be capable of them. The ‘saved’ thief experiences an ecstatic happiness which can never come to the honest atheist: he is tempted to steal again to repeat the glorious sensation. But if the atheist steals he has no such happiness. He is a thief and knows that he is a thief. Nothing can rub that off him. He may try to sooth his shame by some sort of restitution or equivalent act of benevolence; but that does not alter the fact that he did steal; and his conscience will not be easy until he has conquered his will to steal and changed himself into an honest man. – George Bernard Shaw

The seven deadly sins… food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes,respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from man’s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted. – George Bernard Shaw

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. – George Bernard Shaw

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business. – George Bernard Shaw

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech. – George Bernard Shaw

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for a living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. – George Bernard Shaw

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor. – George Bernard Shaw

The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it. – George Bernard Shaw

The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language. – George Bernard Shaw

The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction. – George Bernard Shaw

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

The whole problem with the world is the fools and fanatics are always so sure of themselves, and wiser people are full of doubts. – George Bernard Shaw

The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs. – George Bernard Shaw

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

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity. – George Bernard Shaw

The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober. – George Bernard Shaw

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

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses. – George Bernard Shaw

There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves. – George Bernard Shaw

There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes. – George Bernard Shaw

There are only two qualities in the world: efficiency and inefficiency, and only two sorts of people: the efficient and the inefficient. – George Bernard Shaw

There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists. – George Bernard Shaw

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it. – George Bernard Shaw

There is at bottom only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate the phagocytes. – George Bernard Shaw

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it. – George Bernard Shaw

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. – George Bernard Shaw

There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot. – George Bernard Shaw

There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. It is in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. – George Bernard Shaw

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

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it. – George Bernard Shaw

There is the eternal war between those who are in the world for what they can get out of it and those who are in the world to make it a better place for everybody to live in. – George Bernard Shaw

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay. – George Bernard Shaw

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. – George Bernard Shaw

Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is? – George Bernard Shaw

Those who understand evil pardon it – George Bernard Shaw

Time enough to think of the future when you haven’t any future to think of. – George Bernard Shaw

Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior. – George Bernard Shaw

To withhold deserved praise lest it should make its object conceited is as dishonest as to withhold payment of a just debt lest your creditor should spend the money badly. – George Bernard Shaw

Two percent of the people think. Three percent of the people think they think. And ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think. – George Bernard Shaw

Two things define you: Your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything. – George Bernard Shaw

Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it. – George Bernard Shaw

Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character. – George Bernard Shaw

Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author’s equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus. – George Bernard Shaw

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

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money. – George Bernard Shaw

We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women’s hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them. – George Bernard Shaw

We don’t bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don’t dress well and we’ve no manners. – George Bernard Shaw

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. – George Bernard Shaw

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it. – George Bernard Shaw

We have no reason to suppose that we are the Creator’s last word. – George Bernard Shaw

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession. – George Bernard Shaw

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience. – George Bernard Shaw

We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be. – George Bernard Shaw

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy. – George Bernard Shaw

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

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us! – George Bernard Shaw

We’ve already established what you are, ma’am. Now we’re just haggling over the price. – George Bernard Shaw

Well, the matter is, sir, that you can’t take a girl up like that as if you were picking up a pebble on the beach. – George Bernard Shaw

What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which habitually acts. – George Bernard Shaw

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car? – George Bernard Shaw

What God hath joined together no man ever shall put asunder: God will take care of that. – George Bernard Shaw

What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I’m playing straight with you. I ain’t pretending to be deserving. – George Bernard Shaw

What is the matter with our universities is that all the students are schoolboys, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be men. – George Bernard Shaw

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books. – George Bernard Shaw

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods. – George Bernard Shaw

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity. – George Bernard Shaw

What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing. – George Bernard Shaw

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering. – George Bernard Shaw

What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it. – George Bernard Shaw

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn’t got any. – George Bernard Shaw

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater. – George Bernard Shaw

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty. – George Bernard Shaw

When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth. – George Bernard Shaw

When I was a young man I observed than nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn’t want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work – George Bernard Shaw

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work. – George Bernard Shaw

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices. – George Bernard Shaw

When we come to creative art, to the living word of a man delivering a message to his own time, it is clear that any attempt to alter this later on is simply fraud and forgery.

When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to. – George Bernard Shaw

When you prevent me from doing anything I want to do, that is persecution; but when I prevent you from doing anything you want to do, that is law, order and morals. – George Bernard Shaw

When you vote, you only change the names of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new. – George Bernard Shaw

When your eyes are fixed in the stare of unconsciousness, and your throat coughs the last gasping breath – as one dragged in the dark to a great precipice – what assistance are a wife and child? – George Bernard Shaw

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course. – George Bernard Shaw

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

Why is it that the people who know how to enjoy themselves never have any money and the people who have money never know how to enjoy themselves? – George Bernard Shaw

Why not give Christianity a trial? The question seems a hopeless one after 2,000 years of resolute adherence to the old cry of ‘Not this man, but Barabbas.’ Yet it is beginning to look as if Barabbas was a failure, in spite of his strong right hand, his victories, his empires, his millions of money, and his moralities and churches and political constitutions. ‘This man’ has not been a failure yet; for nobody has ever been sane enough to try his way. – George Bernard Shaw

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn’t! – George Bernard Shaw

Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that. Why should I be filthy and inhuman? Why should I be an accomplice in the wholesale horror and degradation of the slaughter-house? – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. – George Bernard Shaw

Yesterday is the past, tomorrow is the future, today is a gift – that’s why it’s called the present. – George Bernard Shaw

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub. – George Bernard Shaw

You can easily find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty; but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy. – George Bernard Shaw

You cannot believe in honor until you have achieved it. Better keep yourself clean and bright: you are the window through which you must see the world. – George Bernard Shaw

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes. – George Bernard Shaw

You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll – George Bernard Shaw

You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, don’t you? Very well: be off with you to the sort of people you like. Marry some sentimental hog or other with lots of money, and a thick pair of lips to kiss you with and a thick pair of boots to kick you with. – George Bernard Shaw

You have caused me to lose my temper: a thing that has hardly ever happened to me before. – George Bernard Shaw

You have learned something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

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

You see things; you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not? – George Bernard Shaw

You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. – George Bernard Shaw

You think that you are Ann’s suitor; that you are the pursuer and she the pursued … Fool: it is you who are the pursued, the marked down quarry, the destined prey. – George Bernard Shaw

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul. – George Bernard Shaw

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race. – George Bernard Shaw

Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated: they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only ‘frail.’ – George Bernard Shaw

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children. – George Bernard Shaw

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children. – George Bernard Shaw

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing. – George Bernard Shaw

You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race. – George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw Quotes On Life

A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance. – George Bernard Shaw

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. – George Bernard Shaw

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth. – George Bernard Shaw

Alcohol is a very necessary article… It makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning. – George Bernard Shaw

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life. – George Bernard Shaw

All I ask is my rights as a father; and you’re the last man alive to expect me to let her go for nothing; for I can see you’re one of the straight sort, Governor. Well, what’s a five pound note to you? And what’s Eliza to me? – George Bernard Shaw

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death. – George Bernard Shaw

As long as I live I must write. If I stopped writing I should die for wanting something to do. – George Bernard Shaw

Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing. – George Bernard Shaw

But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth. – George Bernard Shaw

Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family. – George Bernard Shaw

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life. – George Bernard Shaw

Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in. – George Bernard Shaw

Geniuses are morbid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. – George Bernard Shaw

He didn’t dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life. – George Bernard Shaw

Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo. – George Bernard Shaw

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo. – George Bernard Shaw

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. – George Bernard Shaw

I have never sneered in my life. Sneering doesn’t become either the human face or the human soul. I am expressing my righteous contempt for Commercialism. I don’t and won’t trade in affection. You call me a brute because you couldn’t buy a claim on me by fetching my slippers and finding my spectacles. You were a fool: I think a woman fetching a man’s slippers is a disgusting sight: did I ever fetch your slippers? I think a good deal more of you for throwing them in my face. No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who cares for a slave? – George Bernard Shaw

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

If you are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life, your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live. – George Bernard Shaw

If you strike a child take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven. – George Bernard Shaw

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you’ll find you’ve done it. – George Bernard Shaw

If you’re not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself. – George Bernard Shaw

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. – George Bernard Shaw

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it. – George Bernard Shaw

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh. – George Bernard Shaw

Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment; and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. – George Bernard Shaw

Life is not a “brief candle”. It is a splendid torch that I want to make burn as brightly as possible before handing on to future generations. – George Bernard Shaw

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

Life is too short for men to take it seriously. – George Bernard Shaw

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. – George Bernard Shaw

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent. – George Bernard Shaw

Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements. – George Bernard Shaw

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

Of Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond. – George Bernard Shaw

Self-control is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive. – George Bernard Shaw

Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality. – George Bernard Shaw

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing. – George Bernard Shaw

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life. – George Bernard Shaw

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life. – George Bernard Shaw

The harder I work the more I live. – George Bernard Shaw

The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die. – George Bernard Shaw

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time. – George Bernard Shaw

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. – George Bernard Shaw

The true joy of life is being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown to the scrap heap being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances. – George Bernard Shaw

The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out. – George Bernard Shaw

There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem. – George Bernard Shaw

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it. – George Bernard Shaw

This is the true joy in life: Being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it what I can. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations. – George Bernard Shaw

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying. – George Bernard Shaw

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 opinion, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

Who asked him to make a gentleman of me? I was happy. I was free. I touched pretty nigh everybody for money when I wanted it, same as I touched you, Henry Higgins. Now I am worried; tied neck and heels; and everybody touches me for money. It’s a fine thing for you, says my solicitor. Is it? says I. You mean it’s a good thing for you, I says. When I was a poor man and had a solicitor once when they found a pram in the dust cart, he got me off, and got shut of me and got me shut of him as quick as he could. Same with the doctors: used to shove me out of the hospital before I could hardly stand on my legs, and nothing to pay. Now they finds out that I’m not a healthy man and can’t live unless they looks after me twice a day. In the house I’m not let do a hand’s turn for myself: somebody else must do it and touch me for it. A year ago I hadn’t a relative in the world except two or three that wouldn’t speak to me. Now I’ve fifty, and not a decent week’s wages among the lot of them. I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle class morality. – George Bernard Shaw

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live. – George Bernard Shaw

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. – George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw Quotes On Love

A love affair should always be a honeymoon. And the only way to make sure of that is to keep changing the man; for the same man can never keep it up. – George Bernard Shaw

A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon. – George Bernard Shaw

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity: no really self-respecting woman would take advantage of it. – George Bernard Shaw

He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it. – George Bernard Shaw

I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything – George Bernard Shaw

I know of only one duty, and that is to love. – George Bernard Shaw

I will never marry a man I love too much. It would give him a terrible advantage over me. – George Bernard Shaw

If a woman can, by careful selection of a father and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it. – George Bernard Shaw

If I were a woman, I’d simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I’d got the vote. – George Bernard Shaw

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself. – George Bernard Shaw

It is most unwise for people in love to marry. – George Bernard Shaw

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

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else. – George Bernard Shaw

Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion. – George Bernard Shaw

Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification. – George Bernard Shaw

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can’t sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can’t sleep with the window open. – George Bernard Shaw

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

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity. – George Bernard Shaw

Marriage: When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part. – George Bernard Shaw

Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no sincerer love than the love of food. – George Bernard Shaw

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty. – George Bernard Shaw

Only Lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty. – George Bernard Shaw

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love. – George Bernard Shaw

She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man. – George Bernard Shaw

The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me. – George Bernard Shaw

The ideal love affair is one conducted by post. – George Bernard Shaw

The love of economy is the root of all virtue. – George Bernard Shaw

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her. – George Bernard Shaw

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post. – George Bernard Shaw

The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel. – George Bernard Shaw

There is no love sincerer than the love of food. – George Bernard Shaw

Vitality in a woman is a blind fury of creation. – George Bernard Shaw

When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind. – George Bernard Shaw

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another. – George Bernard Shaw

Women, for the sake of their children and parents, submit to slaveries and prostitutions that no unattached woman would endure. – George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw Quotes From Wikiquote

1890s

• The old Whigs and new Tories of the school of Cobden and Bright, the “Philosophic Radicals,” the economists of whom Bastiat is the type, Lord Wemyss and Lord Bramwell, Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Auberon Herbert, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Leonard Courtney: any of these is, in England, a more typical Anarchist than Bakounin. They distrust State action, and are jealous advocates of the prerogative of the individual, proposing to restrict the one and to extend the other as far as is humanly possible, in opposition to the Social-Democrat, who proposes to democratize the State and throw upon it the whole work of organizing the national industry, thereby making it the most vital organ in the social body.
  • ‘The Impossibilities of Anarchism’, a paper read to the Fabian Society on 16 October 1891, reprinted in The Impossibilities of Anarchism (Fabian tract no. 45, 1895), pp. 4–5

• Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…
  • The World (15 November 1893)

• Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it…
  • The World (18 July 1894), Music in London 1890-1894 being criticisms contributed week by week to The World (New York: Vienna House, 1973)

• But no public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means; and I have no reason to hope that Mr Coote may be an exception to the rule.
  • “The Living Pictures”, The Saturday Review, LXXIX (April 6, 1895), 443, reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties (1932). Vol. 1. London: Constable & Co. 79-86

• My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
  • Answers to Nine Questions (September 1896), answers to nine questions submitted by Clarence Rook, who had interviewed him in 1895

• Die Walküre is endured by the average man because it contains four scenes for which he would sit out a Scotch sermon, or even a House of Commons debate. These are the love duet in the first act, Brunnhilde’s announcement of death in the second, the ride of the Valkyries and the ‘fire-charm’ in the third. For them the ordinary playgoer endures hours of Wotan, with Christopher Sly’s prayer in his heart. ‘Would ’twere over!’ Now, I am one of those elect souls who are deeply moved by Wotan. I grant you that as a long-winded, one-eyed gentleman backing a certain champion in a fight and henpecked out of his fancy because his wife objects to the moral character of the champion, he is a dreary person indeed . . . but to one who has understood all its beauties, its lofty aspirations, its tragedy, there is nothing trivial, nothing tedious in Die Walküre.
  • comments after attending the 1896 Bayreuth Festival. Quoted in “Visits to Valhalla: The Ectasy And the Agony” by Carolyn Abbatte, New York Times, March 26, 1989. Access date April 1, 2021.

• We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
  • Candida, Act I (1898)

• I’m only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don’t like beer.
  • Candida, Act III

• We don’t bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don’t dress well and we’ve no manners.
  • You Never Can Tell, Act I (1898)

• The great advantage of a hotel is that it’s a refuge from home life.
  • You Never Can Tell, Act II

• My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.
  • You Never Can Tell, Act IV

• I had not achieved a success; but I provoked an uproar; and the sensation was so agreeable that I resolved to try again.
  • Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant, Vol. I, preface (1898)
• There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
  • Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, Vol. II, preface (1898)

• You’re not a man, you’re a machine.
  • Arms and the Man, Act III (1898)

• Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that. Why should I be filthy and inhuman? Why should I be an accomplice in the wholesale horror and degradation of the slaughter-house?
  • Interview “What Vegetarianism Really Means: a Talk with Mr Bernard Shaw”, in Vegetarian (15 January 1898), reprinted in Shaw: Interviews and Recollections, edited by A. M. Gibbs, 1990, p. 401

Quintessence Of Ibsenism (1891; 1913)

A review of the works and ideas of Henrik Ibsen

• I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self. In the case of a work which is a mere exhibition of skill in conventional art, there may be some excuse for the delusion that the longer the artist works on it the nearer he will bring it to perfection. Yet even the victims of this delusion must see that there is an age limit to the process, and that though a man of forty-five may improve the workmanship of a man of thirty-five, it does not follow that a man of fifty-five can do the same.
  When we come to creative art, to the living word of a man delivering a message to his own time, it is clear that any attempt to alter this later on is simply fraud and forgery. As I read the old Quintessence of Ibsenism I may find things that I see now at a different angle, or correlate with so many things then unnoted by me that they take on a different aspect. But though this may be a reason for writing another book, it is not a reason for altering an existing one.
  • Preface to the 1913 edition

• Just as the liar’s punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.
  • The Two Pioneers

• The salvation of the world depends on the men who will not take evil good-humouredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him.
  • What is the New Element in the Norwegian School?

The Philanderer (1893)

• It’s well to be off with the Old Woman before you’re on with the New.
  • Act II

• The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
  • Act II

• The test of a man or woman’s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
  • Act IV

Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893)

• People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.
  • Vivie, Act II

• There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
  • Crofts, Act III

• I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On.
  • Praed, Act IV

Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)

• Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar! I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day’s deed, and think my night’s thought.
  • Act I

• My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God — nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?
  • Act I

• THEODOTUS: Caesar: you are a stranger here, and not conversant with our laws. The kings and queens of Egypt may not marry except with their own royal blood. Ptolemy and Cleopatra are born king and consort just as they are born brother and sister.
  BRITANNUS (shocked): Caesar: this is not proper.
  THEODOTUS (outraged): How!
  CAESAR (recovering his self-possession): Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
  • Act II; sometimes paraphrased as: The customs of your tribe are not laws of nature.

• When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
  • Act III

• Again, there is the illusion of “increased command over Nature,” meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man’s increased command over Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us.
  • Notes

1900s

• The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.
  • Three Plays for Puritans, Preface (1900)

• I delight in the war more & more. It has waked up the country out of its filthy wallowing in money (blood is a far superior bath); and it has put a fourpence on the Income Tax which will never come off it if the Fabian can help it; so that Old Age Pensions will be within reach at the end of the ten years repayment period, if not sooner. … Charrington calls me a Tory because I declare for Imperialism as our social theory.
  • On the Boer War; letter to Henry Stephens Salt (12 March 1900), quoted in George Bernard Shaw, Collected Letters: 1898–1910, ed. Dan H. Laurence (1985), p. 153

• The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.
  • The Devil’s Disciple, Act II (1901)

• Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.
  • The Devil’s Disciple, Act II

• I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.
  • Interview “Who I Am, and What I Think”, in Frank Harris’s periodical The Candid Friend (May 1901), reprinted in Sixteen Self Sketches, 1949, p. 53; quoted in Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 1984, p. 42

• You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
  • The Irrational Knot, Preface (1905)

• [Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.
  • The Irrational Knot (1905)

• To understand a saint, you must hear the devil’s advocate; and the same is true of the artist.
  • The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense about Artists being Degenerate (1908)

• Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.
  • The Shewing Up of Blanco Posnet (1909): The Rejected Statement, Pt. I : The Limits to Toleration

• This is the real enemy, the invader from the East, the Druze, the ruffian, the oriental parasite; in a word: the Jew.
  • London Morning Post, December 3, 1925

• This craving for bouquets by Jews is a symptom of racial degeneration. The Jews are worse than my own people. Those Jews who still want to be the chosen race (chosen by the late Lord Balfour) can go to Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop being Jews and start being human beings.
  • Literary Digest, October 12, 1932

Love Among the Artists (1900)

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

• The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don’t want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

• There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.

• All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense.

• If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling. Corrupt successes, disgraceful failures, or sheeplike vegetation are all it has to offer. I prefer Art, which gives me a sixth sense of beauty, with self-respect: perhaps also an immortal reputation in return for honest endeavour in a labour of love.

• Perhaps woman’s art is of woman’s life a thing apart, ’tis man’s whole existence; just as love is said to be the reverse — though it isn’t.

• I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats.

• A man’s own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

• Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family.

• Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.

• Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

Man and Superman (1903)

• This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
  • p. xxxi

• There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
  • p. 23

• The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
  • p. 37

• The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.
  • p. 121

• Economy is the art of making the most of life. The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
  • p. 235

Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Full text online

• Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
  • #1

• If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
  • #16

• Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
  • #17

• He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.
  • #23

• Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
  • #25

• The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.
  • #26

• Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.
  • #28

• A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.
  • #32

• The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent’s first duty.
  • #33

• Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
  • #39

• No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
  • #41

• The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.
  • #55

• Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
  • #57

• When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
  • #62

• It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.
  • #65

• There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.
  • #68

• Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
  • #83

• Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
  • #87

• Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
  • #88

• Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
  • #89

• In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.
  • #101

• Happiness and Beauty are by-products.
  • #102

• Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty.
  • #104

• He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.
  • #105

• The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
  • #107

• The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.
  • #108

• In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.
  • #110

• No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.
  • #116

• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
  • #124

• Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.
  • #125

• Decency is Indecency’s Conspiracy of Silence.
  • #126

• Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.
  • #127-128

• No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare.
  • #136

• The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.
  • #149

• The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.
  • #158

• Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
  • #160

• Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections.
  • #162

• Those who understand evil pardon it.
  • #167

• When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of “Orthodoxy, True and False” and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.
  • #172

• If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.
  • #179

Major Barbara (1905)

• I exclude the hypothesis of complete originality on [Charles] Lever’s part, because a man can no more be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of air.
  • Preface

• The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.
  • Preface

• The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.
  • Preface

• It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good. Guarantee a man’s goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man’s liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal.
  • Preface

• Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make … lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.
  • Preface

• I can’t talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.
  • Act II

• You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

• Undershaft: You have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn’t fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year.

• Cusins: Call you poverty a crime?
  Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.

• Undershaft: My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
  • Act II

• You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
  • Act III

• It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income. … What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles?

• He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

John Bull’s Other Island (1907)

• A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.
  • Preface

• You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
  • Preface

• What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

• My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.
  • Act II

Getting Married (1908)

• There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage. If the mischief stopped at talking and thinking it would be bad enough; but it goes further, into disastrous anarchical action. Because our marriage law is inhuman and unreasonable to the point of downright abomination, the bolder and more rebellious spirits form illicit unions, defiantly sending cards round to their friends announcing what they have done. Young women come to me and ask me whether I think they ought to consent to marry the man they have decided to live with; and they are perplexed and astonished when I, who am supposed (heaven knows why!) to have the most advanced views attainable on the subject, urge them on no account to compromise themselves without the security of an authentic wedding ring.
  • Preface

• Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
  • Preface

• When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
  • Preface

• Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.
  • Preface

• Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification.
  • Preface

• Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or religion.
  • Preface

• Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.
  • Preface

• Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every hour. Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of liberty.
  • Preface: “The Personal Sentimental Basis of Monogamy”

• The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.
  • Leo

• Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think.
  • The Bishop

• All progress means war with Society.
  • The Bishop

• The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.
  • Hotchkiss

• You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
  • Mrs. George

• I happen, like Napoleon, to prefer Mohammedanism. [Mrs George, associating Mohammedanism with polygamy, looks at him with quick suspicion]. I believe the whole British Empire will adopt a reformed Mohammedanism before the end of the century. The character of Mahomet is congenial to me. I admire him, and share his views of life to a considerable extent.
  • Hotchkiss

• Religion is a great force — the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don’t understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours. Instead of facing that fact, you persist in trying to convert all men to your own little sect, so that you can use it against them afterwards. You are all missionaries and proselytizers trying to uproot the native religion from your neighbor’s flowerbeds and plant your own in its place. You would rather let a child perish in ignorance than have it taught by a rival sectary. You can talk to me of the quintessential equality of coal merchants and British officers; and yet you can’t see the quintessential equality of all the religions.
  • Hotchkiss

1910s

• Why was I born with such contemporaries?
  • The Dark Lady of the Sonnets, Preface (1910)

• A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”
  • Shaw’s Lecture to the London’s Eugenics Education Society, The Daily Express, (March 4, 1910), quoted in Modernism and the Culture of Efficiency: Ideology and Fiction, Evelyn Cobley, University of Toronto Press (2009) p. 159

• A critic recently described me, with deadly acuteness, as having ‘a kindly dislike of my fellow-creatures.’ Perhaps dread would have been nearer the mark than dislike; for man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
  • As quoted in George Bernard Shaw, his life and works: a critical biography (authorised), Archibald Henderson, Stewart & Kidd (1911), Chapter VII (The Art Critic), pp. 201-202

• The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.
  • Fanny’s First Play, Preface (1911)

• That proves it’s not by Shaw, because all Shaw’s characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.
  • Fanny’s First Play, Epilogue

• As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
  • Overruled (1912)

• Any public committee man who tries to pack the moral cards in the interest of his own notions is guilty of corruption and impertinence. The business of a public library is not to supply the public with the books the committee thinks good for the public, but to supply the public with the books the public wants. … Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read. But as the ratepayer is mostly a coward and a fool in these difficult matters, and the committee is quite sure that it can succeed where the Roman Catholic Church has made its index expurgatorius the laughing-stock of the world, censorship will rage until it reduces itself to absurdity; and even then the best books will be in danger still.
  • As quoted in “Literary Censorship in England” in Current Opinion, Vol. 55, No. 5 (November 1913), p. 378; this has sometimes appeared on the internet in paraphrased form as “Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads”

• Well, I tell you again to get rid of your Constitution. But I suppose you won’t do it. You have a good president and you have a bad Constitution, and the bad Constitution gets the better of the good President all the time. The end of it will be is that you might as well have an English Prime Minister.
  • Newsreel interview by George Bernard Shaw entitled “Various Scenes with George Bernard Shaw,” Fox Movietone Newsreel (1933), referring to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency

• Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.
  • Killing For Sport, Preface (1914)

• All great truths begin as blasphemies.
  • Annajanska (1919)

• You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
  • O’Flaherty V.C. (1919)

Misalliance (1910)

• It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.
  • Preface

• Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.
  • Preface

• A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.

• I like a bit of a mongrel myself, whether it’s a man or a dog; they’re the best for every day.
  • Episode I

• If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
  • Episode I

A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)

• When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.

• Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.

• A nation should always be healthily rebellious; but the king or prime minister has yet to be found who will make trouble by cultivating that side of the national spirit. A child should begin to assert itself early, and shift for itself more and more not only in washing and dressing itself, but in opinions and conduct; yet as nothing is so exasperating and so unlovable as an uppish child, it is useless to expect parents and schoolmasters to inculcate this uppishness. Such unamiable precepts as Always contradict an authoritative statement, Always return a blow, Never lose a chance of a good fight, When you are scolded for a mistake ask the person who scolds you whether he or she supposes you did it on purpose, and follow the question with a blow or an insult or some other unmistakable expression of resentment, Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders, are just as important as those of The Sermon on the Mount; but no one has yet seen them written up in letters of gold in a schoolroom or nursery.

• You are so careful of your boy’s morals, knowing how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner’s Tristan are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom.

• The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it.

The Doctor’s Dilemma (1911)

• Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.
  • Preface

• No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it well, ever loses his self-respect.
  • Preface

• Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
  • Preface

• All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
  • Act I

• I don’t believe in morality. I’m a disciple of Bernard Shaw.
  • Act III

• Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
  • Act V

• Chloroform has done a lot of mischief. It’s enabled every fool to be a surgeon.

Pygmalion (1912)

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

• The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
  • Preface

• He ain’t a copper just look at ‘is boots!
  • Act I

• Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo!!! I ain’t dirty: I washed me face and hands afore I come, I did!
  • Act II

• Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another.
  • Act II

• 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.
  • Act II

• I wouldn’t have ate it, only I’m too lady-like to take it out of my mouth.
  • Act II

• I don’t want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady.
  • Act II

• I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man.
  • Act II

• I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself.
  • Act II

• Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi.
  • Act III

• I heard your prayers Thank God it’s all over!
  • Act IV

• You see, lots of the real people can’t do it at all: they’re such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. There’s always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.

• Time enough to think of the future when you haven’t any future to think of.

• I have to live for others and not for myself; that’s middle-class morality.
  • Act V

• Independence? That’s middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
  • Act V

Androcles and the Lion (1913)

• The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.
  • Preface, The importance of hell in the salvation scheme

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

• Howbeit, Paul succeeded in stealing the image of Christ crucified for the figure-head of his Salvationist vessel, with its Adam posing as the natural man, its doctrine of original sin, and its damnation avoidable only by faith in the sacrifice of the cross. In fact, no sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus.
  • Preface, Paul

The Technique of War (1917)

• He [the British taxpayer] must be taught that war is not precise or economical. It is almost inconceivably wasteful and extravagant. It burns the house to roast the pig, and even then seldom roasts him effectively….. waste is the law of modern war; and nothing is cheap on the battlefield except the lives of men…… Therefore, my taxpayer, resign yourself to this: that we may fight bravely, fight hard, fight long, fight cunningly, fight recklessly, fight in a hundred and fifty ways, but we cannot fight cheaply.
  • The Daily Chronicle on the 7 March 1917.

Heartbreak House (1919)

• “He must be greatly changed. Has he attained the seventh degree of concentration?”
  • Captain Shotover, Act I

• “We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.”
  • Ellie Dunn, Act II

• When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
  • Ellie Dunn, Act II

1920s

• 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 … If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?
  • As quoted in George Bernard Shaw’s “Prefaces” in English Prisons Under Local Government, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, London: Longmans, Green & Co (1922) pp. 31-32

• It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
  • Preface to Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)

• Political necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes.
  • Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)

• Scratch an Englishman and find a Protestant.
  • Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)

• God is on the side of the big battalions.
  • Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)

• Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
  • Saint Joan : A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923)

• The Italians must allow us to slaughter the Momands, because, if we do not kill the warlike hillmen, they will kill us. And we must allow the Italians to slaughter the Danakils for the same reason.
  • Quote about Italy’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia in Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw by Gareth Griffith (1993) p. 267.

• The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy.
  • As Quoted in London Morning Post, (Dec. 3, 1925)

• Some of the things Mussolini has done, and some that he is threatening to do go further in the direction of Socialism than the English Labour Party could yet venture if they were in power.
  • Letter from G. Bernard Shaw to a friend, “Bernard Shaw’s Defence of Mussolini,” (Feb. 7, 1927)

• [Mussolini was] farther to the Left in his political opinions than any of his socialist rivals.
  • As quoted in, Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw, Gareth Griffith, Routledge, (2002) p. 253, Manchester Guardian (1927)

• Socialists must be in favor of an aristocratic form of government. We must have the best men for the job . . . In the dictator you must have a man who has not only the power to govern but the force of character to impose himself as dictator whether you like him or not.
  • “Socialism urged to find dictator,” Berkeley Daily Gazette (Nov. 30, 1927)

• Our natural dispositions may be good; but we have been badly brought up, and are full of anti-social personal ambitions and prejudices and snobberies. Had we not better teach our children to be better citizens than ourselves? We are not doing that at present. The Russians are. That is my last word. Think over it.
  • The Apple Cart (1928) Preface

• One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.
  • The Apple Cart (1928), Act I

• God help England if she had no Scots to think for her!
  • The Apple Cart (1928), Act II
• We should refuse to tolerate poverty as a social institution not because the poor are the salt of the earth, but because ‘the poor in a lump are bad’.
  • The Intelligent Woman’s Guide: To Socialism and Capitalism. p. 219.
• We have to confess it: Capitalist mankind in the lump is detestable. …Both rich and poor are really hateful in themselves. For my part I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination. I pity the rich a little, but am equally bent on their extermination. The working classes, the ruling classes, the professional classes, the propertied classes, the ruling classes, are each more odious than the other: they have no right to live: I should despair if I did not know that they will all die presently, and that there is no need on earth why they should be replaced by people like themselves… And yet I am not in the least a misanthrope. I am a person of normal affections
  • The Intelligent Woman’s Guide: To Socialism and Capitalism. p. 456.

• Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry 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 Intelligent Woman’s Guide: To Socialism and Capitalism, New York: NY, Brentano (1928) p. 670.

• It is far more likely that by the time nationalization has become the rule, and private enterprise the exception, Socialism (which is really rather a bad name for the business) will be spoken of, if at all, as a crazy religion held by a fanatical sect in that darkest of dark ages, the nineteenth century. Already, indeed, I am told that Socialism has had its day, and that the sooner we stop talking nonsense about it and set to work, like the practical people we are, to nationalize the coal mines and complete a national electrification scheme, the better. And I, who said forty years ago that we should have had Socialism already but for the Socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing. What I meant by my jibe at the Socialists of the eighteen-eighties was that nothing is ever done, and much is prevented, by people who do not realize that they cannot do everything at once.
  • The Intelligent Woman’s Guide To Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism (1928)

• Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again, because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman’s work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it.
  • The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, Chapter 8 (1928)

• Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.
  • The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, Chapter 82 (1928)

• Well, of course, they notice you. You always hide just in the middle of the limelight.
  • Reply to T. E. Lawrence who complained of press attention.
  • Quoted by Harry Kessler in his diary, 14 November 1929

Back to Methuselah (1921)

• In truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true: what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him.
  • Is there any hope in education?

• People will have their miracles, their stories, their heroes and heroines and saints and martyrs and divinities to exercise their gifts of affection, admiration, wonder, and worship, and their Judases and devils to enable them to be angry and yet feel that they do well to be angry. Every one of these legends is the common heritage of the human race; and there is only one inexorable condition attached to their healthy enjoyment, which is that no one shall believe them literally. The reading of stories and delighting in them made Don Quixote a gentleman: the believing them literally made him a madman who slew lambs instead of feeding them.
  • A Touchstone For Dogma

• I hear you say “Why?” Always “Why?” You see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I : In the Beginning, Act I
  • This quote is sometimes misattributed to Robert F. Kennedy. It is often paraphrased slightly in a few different ways, including: You see things as they are and ask, “Why?” I dream things as they never were and ask, “Why not?”

• I worship you, Eve. I must have something to worship. Something quite different to myself, like you. There must be something greater than the snake.
  • The Serpent, in Pt I : In the Beginning

• Everything is possible: everything. Listen. I am old. I am the old serpent, older than Adam, older than Eve. I remember Lilith, who came before Adam and Eve. I was her darling as I am yours. She was alone: there was no man with her. She saw death as you saw it when the fawn fell; and she knew then that she must find out how to renew herself and cast the skin like me. She had a mighty will: she strove and strove and willed and willed for more moons than there are leaves on all the trees of the garden. Her pangs were terrible: her groans drove sleep from Eden. She said it must never be again: that the burden of renewing life was past bearing: that it was too much for one. And when she cast the skin, lo! there was not one new Lilith but two: one like herself, the other like Adam. You were the one: Adam was the other.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• 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 Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• THE SERPENT: The voice in the garden is your own voice.
  ADAM: It is; and it is not. It is something greater than me: I am only a part of it.
  EVE: The Voice does not tell me not to kill you. Yet I do not want you to die before me. No voice is needed to make me feel that.
  ADAM [throwing his arm round her shoulder with an expression of anguish]: Oh no: that is plain without any voice. There is something that holds us together, something that has no word —
  THE SERPENT: Love. Love. Love.
  ADAM: That is too short a word for so long a thing.
  • The Serpent, Adam, and Eve, in Pt. I, Act I

• I make no vows. I take my chance. … It means that I fear certainty as you fear uncertainty. It means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I

• You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.
  • Eve to Cain, in Pt. I, Act II

• Your father is a fool skin deep; but you are a fool to your very marrow.
  • Eve to Cain, in Pt. I, Act II

• Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.
  • Franklyn, in Pt. II : The Gospel of the Brothers Barnabas

• There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.
  • Confucius, in Pt. III : The Thing Happens

• Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
  • Pt. V : As Far as Thought Can Reach

• Silence is the perfect expression of scorn.
  • Pt. V

• The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.
  • Pt. V

• Life is not meant to be easy, my child but take courage: it can be delightful.
  • Pt. V; see also the later phrasing of Malcolm Fraser, “life wasn’t meant to be easy”

• THE HE-ANCIENT: When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth
  STREPHON: Yes; and take all the fun out of it.
  • Pt. V

• Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls.
  • The She-Ancient, in Pt. V

• When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.
  • The He-Ancient, in Pt. V

• Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.
  • Acis, in Pt. V

• Even a vortex is a vortex in something. You can’t have a whirlpool without water; and you can’t have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.
  • Acis, in Pt. V

• The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [indicating her body], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.
  • The She-Ancient, in Pt. V

• I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough.
  • The Serpent, in Pt. V

• They have accepted the burden of eternal life. They have taken the agony from birth; and their life does not fail them even in the hour of their destruction.
  • Lilith, in Pt. V

• I had patience with them for many ages: they tried me very sorely. They did terrible things: they embraced death, and said that eternal life was a fable. I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made…
  • Lilith, in Pt. V

• They have redeemed themselves from their vileness, and turned away from their sins. Best of all, they are still not satisfied: the impulse I gave them in that day when I sundered myself in twain and launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force.

• I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.

• I say, let them dread, of all things, stagnation; for from the moment I, Lilith, lose hope and faith in them, they are doomed. In that hope and faith I have let them live for a moment; and in that moment I have spared them many times. But mightier creatures than they have killed hope and faith, and perished from the earth; and I may not spare them for ever. I am Lilith: I brought life into the whirlpool of force, and compelled my enemy, Matter, to obey a living soul. But in enslaving Life’s enemy I made him Life’s master; for that is the end of all slavery; and now I shall see the slave set free and the enemy reconciled, the whirlpool become all life and no matter. And because these infants that call themselves ancients are reaching out towards that, I will have patience with them still; though I know well that when they attain it they shall become one with me and supersede me, and Lilith will be only a legend and a lay that has lost its meaning. Of Life only is there no end; and though of its million starry mansions many are empty and many still unbuilt, and though its vast domain is as yet unbearably desert, my seed shall one day fill it and master its matter to its uttermost confines. And for what may be beyond, the eyesight of Lilith is too short. It is enough that there is a beyond.
  • Lilith, in Pt. V

1930s

• No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.
  • Our Theatres In The Nineties (1930)

• I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot.
  • New York Times (19 December 1930) remarks on Sinclair Lewis receiving the Nobel Prize

• We should not think that the importance of Lenin is a matter of the past, because Lenin died. We should think of the future, of the importance of Lenin for the future, and his importance for the future is such that, should the experiment Lenin undertook — the experiment of socialism — fail, then modern civilization will perish, like many civilizations have already perished in the past.
  • Dimitry Dazhin, “A World Genius” “A World Genius” Soviet Military Review, March 1970, p. 4, (1931)

• I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly tell our children that honesty is the best policy.
  • “Rungs of the Ladder”, BBC Radio broadcast, 11 July 1932

• As a red hot Communist I am in favour of fascism. The only drawback to Sir Oswald’s movement is that it is not quite British enough.
  • As quoted in Socialism and Superior Brains: The Political Thought of Bernard Shaw, Gareth Griffith, Routledge (1993) p. 264. Originally from Bernard Shaw, The News Chronicle, “The Blackshirt Challenge,” (Jan. 17, 1934).

• An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.
  • Speech at New York (11 April 1933)

• Hitler is a very remarkable man, a very able man… What Hitler should have done was not to drive the Jews out, what he ought to have said was, ‘I will tolerate the Jews to any extent on condition that no Jew mar¬ries a Jewess, on condition that he marries a German.’
  • “Shaw Heaps Praise upon the Dictators: While Parliaments Get Nowhere, He Says, Mussolini and Stalin Do Things,” New York Times (Dec. 10, 1933), Shaw’s lecture before the Fabian Society in London called “The Politics of Unpolitical Animals.” (Nov. 23, 1933)

• Until you have socialism you will never have State solidity, because, as we know, if you have private property you will immediately split your stake. You get the class conflict, the class struggle, the confrontation of interests between the proprietors and between the proletariat; and, therefore, you have something that is crumbling, that is divided against itself.
  • “Shaw Heaps Praise upon the Dictators: While Parliaments Get Nowhere, He Says, Mussolini and Stalin Do Things,” New York Times (Dec. 10, 1933), Shaw’s lecture before the Fabian Society in London called “The Politics of Unpolitical Animals.” (Nov. 23, 1933)

• You in America should trust to that volcanic political instinct which I have divined in you.
  • Speech at New York (11 April 1933)

• I don’t want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I might want to kill (…) I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioner and say every 5 years or every 7 years… Just put them there and say: ‘Sir,’ –or ‘madam,’– ‘will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little bit more then clearly we cannot use the big organisation of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive. Because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.’
  • “George Bernard Shaw reopens capital punishment controversy”, Paramount British Pictures (March 5, 1931)

• Mussolini, Kemal, Pilsudski, Hitler and the rest can all depend on me to judge them by their ability to deliver the goods and not by… comfortable notions of freedom. Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that seemed impossible ten years ago; and I take off my hat to him accordingly.
  • As quoted in “Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 47. Also reported in Political Pilgrams: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society, Paul Hollander, New Brunswick, N.J: Transaction Publishers (1998) p. 169

• Now take Stalin himself. He is ‘neither duke nor peer’, not a king, not a chancellor, not a dictator, not a Prime Minister, not an archbishop, not entitled to salutes enforced by youths in coloured shirts, but simply secretary of the supreme controlling organ of the hierarchy, subject to dismissal at five minutes’ notice if he does not give satisfaction. This position he has attained through the survival of the fittest, and has held through the years of the most appalling vicissitudes that ever attended the birth pangs of a new civilisation.
  • As quoted in “Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 40

• Stalin has exiled Trotsky and become the Pontifex Maximus of the new Russo-Catholic Church of Communism on two grounds. First, he is a practical Nationalist statesman recognizing that Russia is a big enough handful for mortal rulers to tackle without taking on the rest of the world as well…. Second, Stalin, inflexible as to his final aim, is a compete opportunist as to the means.
  • As quoted in “Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 26

• The news from Germany is the very best news that we have had since the war. Ever since 1918 we, like all the other powers, have been behaving just as badly as we possibly could. Well now, when Germany fell, they want and they sat on Germany’s head and they kept sitting on Germany’s head, although it was quite preposterous, quite evident to any sensible persona, that they couldn’t go on like that forever. Then there came a very intelligent gentleman named Adolf Hitler and he, knowing perfectly well that the powers would not fight, he snapped his fingers at the Treaty of Versailles. Just exactly as if we in England had been in the same position. As if the powers had beaten us and sat on our head.
  • From an interview in 1935. James Curran, Anthony Smith & Pauline Wingate, ed (1987). Impacts and Influences: Media Power in the Twentieth Century. Taylor & Francis. pp. 90-91. ISBN 978-0-416-00612-4., George Bernard Shaw Speaks on Hitler and Germany 1935 (video)

• Then the first man who had the gumption to see that we might get up on our legs and defy all those old treaties, he would be the most popular man in England. There can be no peace in the world until there is peace between England, France, Germany, Russia, the United States and all the big powers of the West. Now take that home and think about it and don’t be frightened any more about the Germans.
  • About the Treaty of Versailles in 1935. George Bernard Shaw Speaks on Hitler and Germany 1935 (video)

• Dear Katharine Cornell: I don’t think I was ever so astonished by a picture as I was by your photograph. Your success as Candida and something blonde and expansive about your name had created an ideal British Candida in my imagination. Fancy my feelings on seeing the photograph of a gorgeous dark lady from the cradle of the human race … wherever that was … Ceylon … Sumatra … Hilo … or the southernmost corner of the Garden of Eden. If you look like that it doesn’t matter a rap if you can act or not. Can you? Yours, breath bereaved, Bernard Shaw.
  • Letter to Katharine Cornell, circa 1936; as quoted in [https://archive.org/details/leadingladyworld00mose/page/187/mode/2up Leading Lady : The World and Theatre of Katharine Cornell (1978) by Tad Mosel, p. 187

• We ought to tackle the Jewish question by admitting the right of States to make eugenic experiments by weeding out any strains that they think undesirable, but insisting that they should do it as humanely as they can afford to, and not shock civilization by such misdemeanors as the expulsion and robbery of Einstein.
  • As quoted in Bernard Shaw: Collected Letters 1926-1950, D.H. Laurence, editor, London, UK, 1988, p. 493, letter to Beatrice Webb (1938)

On the Rocks (1933)

• In this play a reference is made by a Chief of Police to the political necessity for killing people: a necessity so distressing to the statesmen and so terrifying to the common citizen that nobody except myself (as far as I know) has ventured to examine it directly on its own merits, although every Government is obliged to practise it on a scale varying from the execution of a single murderer to the slaughter of millions of quite innocent persons. Whilst assenting to these proceedings, and even acclaiming and celebrating them, we dare not tell ourselves what we are doing or why we are doing it; and so we call it justice or capital punishment or our duty to king and country or any other convenient verbal whitewash for what we instinctively recoil from as from a dirty job. These childish evasions are revolting. We must strip off the whitewash and find out what is really beneath it. Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.
  • Preface; Extermination
  • Ignoring the satirical elements of Shaw’s rhetoric, and that he is presenting many arguments of sometimes questionable sincerity for the “humane” execution of criminals, the last sentence here has sometimes been misquoted as if it as part of an argument for exterminations for the sake of eugenics, by preceding it with a selected portion of a statement later in the essay: “If we desire a certain type of civilization, we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it … Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly”.

• In law we draw a line between the killing of human animals and non-human ones, setting the latter apart as brutes. This was founded on a general belief that humans have immortal souls and brutes none. Nowadays more and more people are refusing to make this distinction. They may believe in The Life Everlasting and The Life to Come; but they make no distinction between Man and Brute, because some of them believe that brutes have souls, whilst others refuse to believe that the physical materializations and personifications of The Life Everlasting are themselves everlasting. In either case the mystic distinction between Man and Brute vanishes; and the murderer pleading that though a rabbit should be killed for being mischievous he himself should be spared because he has an immortal soul and a rabbit has none is as hopelessly out of date as a gentleman duellist pleading his clergy. When the necessity for killing a dangerous human being arises, as it still does daily, the only distinction we make between a man and a snared rabbit is that we very quaintly provide the man with a minister of religion to explain to him that we are not killing him at all, but only expediting his transfer to an eternity of bliss.
  • Preface; The Sacredness of Human Life

• The extermination of what the exterminators call inferior races is as old as history. “Stone dead hath no fellow” said Cromwell when he tried to exterminate the Irish. “The only good nigger is a dead nigger” say the Americans of the Ku-Klux temperament. “Hates any man the thing he would not kill?” said Shylock naively. But we white men, as we absurdly call ourselves in spite of the testimony of our looking glasses, regard all differently colored folk as inferior species. Ladies and gentlemen class rebellious laborers with vermin. The Dominicans, the watchdogs of God, regarded the Albigenses as the enemies of God, just as Torquemada regarded the Jews as the murderers of God. All that is an old story: what we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it. There is a difference between the shooting at sight of aboriginal natives in the back blocks of Australia and the massacres of aristocrats in the terror which followed the foreign attacks on the French Revolution. The Australian gunman pots the aboriginal natives to satisfy his personal antipathy to a black man with uncut hair. But nobody in the French Republic had this feeling about Lavoisier, nor can any German Nazi have felt that way about Einstein. Yet Lavoisier was guillotined; and Einstein has had to fly for his life from Germany. It was silly to say that the Republic had no use for chemists; and no Nazi has stultified his party to the extent of saying that the new National Socialist Fascist State in Germany has no use for mathematician-physicists. The proposition is that aristocrats (Lavoisier’s class) and Jews (Einstein’s race) are unfit to enjoy the privilege of living in a modern society founded on definite principles of social welfare as distinguished from the old promiscuous aggregations crudely policed by chiefs who had no notion of social criticism and no time to invent it.
  • Preface; Previous Attempts Miss the Point.

• There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates, who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.
  • Preface; Cruelty’s Excuses

• I dislike cruelty, even cruelty to other people, and should therefore like to see all cruel people exterminated. But I should recoil with horror from a proposal to punish them. Let me illustrate my attitude by a very famous, indeed far too famous, example of the popular conception of criminal law as a means of delivering up victims to the normal popular lust for cruelty which has been mortified by the restraint imposed on it by civilization. Take the case of the extermination of Jesus Christ. No doubt there was a strong case for it. Jesus was from the point of view of the High Priest a heretic and an impostor. From the point of view of the merchants he was a rioter and a Communist. From the Roman Imperialist point of view he was a traitor. From the commonsense point of view he was a dangerous madman. From the snobbish point of view, always a very influential one, he was a penniless vagrant. From the police point of view he was an obstructor of thoroughfares, a beggar, an associate of prostitutes, an apologist of sinners, and a disparager of judges; and his daily companions were tramps whom he had seduced into vagabondage from their regular trades. From the point of view of the pious he was a Sabbath breaker, a denier of the efficacy of circumcision and the advocate of a strange rite of baptism, a gluttonous man and a winebibber. He was abhorrent to the medical profession as an unqualified practitioner who healed people by quackery and charged nothing for the treatment. He was not anti-Christ: nobody had heard of such a power of darkness then; but he was startlingly anti-Moses. He was against the priests, against the judiciary, against the military, against the city (he declared that it was impossible for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven), against all the interests, classes, principalities and powers, inviting everybody to abandon all these and follow him. By every argument, legal, political, religious, customary, and polite, he was the most complete enemy of the society of his time ever brought to the bar. He was guilty on every count of the indictment, and on many more that his accusers had not the wit to frame. If he was innocent then the whole world was guilty. To acquit him was to throw over civilization and all its institutions. History has borne out the case against him; for no State has ever constituted itself on his principles or made it possible to live according to his commandments: those States who have taken his name have taken it as an alias to enable them to persecute his followers more plausibly.
  It is not surprising that under these circumstances, and in the absence of any defence, the Jerusalem community and the Roman government decided to exterminate Jesus. They had just as much right to do so as to exterminate the two thieves who perished with him.
  • Preface, Leading Case of Jesus Christ

• All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.
  • Pilate, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator

• I am no mere chance pile of flesh and bone: if I were only that, I should fall into corruption and dust before your eyes. I am the embodiment of a thought of God: I am the Word made flesh: that is what holds me together standing before you in the image of God. … The Word is God. And God is within you. … In so far as you know the truth you have it from my God, who is your heavenly father and mine. He has many names and his nature is manifold. … It is by children who are wiser than their fathers, subjects who are wiser than their emperors, beggars and vagrants who are wiser than their priests, that men rise from being beasts of prey to believing in me and being saved. … By their fruits ye shall know them. Beware how you kill a thought that is new to you. For that thought may be the foundation of the kingdom of God on earth.
  • Jesus, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator

• The kingdom of God is striving to come. The empire that looks back in terror shall give way to the kingdom that looks forward with hope. Terror drives men mad: hope and faith give them divine wisdom. The men whom you fill with fear will stick at no evil and perish in their sin: the men whom I fill with faith shall inherit the earth. I say to you Cast out fear. Speak no more vain things to me about the greatness of Rome. … You, standing for Rome, are the universal coward: I, standing for the kingdom of God, have braved everything, lost everything, and won an eternal crown.
  • Jesus, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator

• Law is blind without counsel. The counsel men agree with is vain: it is only the echo of their own voices. A million echoes will not help you to rule righteously. But he who does not fear you and shews you the other side is a pearl of the greatest price. Slay me and you go blind to your damnation. The greatest of God’s names is Counsellor; and when your Empire is dust and your name a byword among the nations the temples of the living God shall still ring with his praise as Wonderful! Counsellor! the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace.
  • Jesus, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator

• The last word remains with Christ and Handel; and this must stand as the best defence of Tolerance until a better man than I makes a better job of it.
  Put shortly and undramatically the case is that a civilization cannot progress without criticism, and must therefore, to save itself from stagnation and putrefaction, declare impunity for criticism. This means impunity not only for propositions which, however novel, seem interesting, statesmanlike, and respectable, but for propositions that shock the uncritical as obscene, seditious, blasphemous, heretical, and revolutionary.
  • Preface, The Sacredness Of Criticism

1940s and later

• The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation.
  • letter, 24 June 1930, to Frank Harris “To Frank Harris on Sex in Biography” Sixteen Self Sketches (1949)

• The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
  • “The Play of Ideas”, New Statesman (6 May 1950)

• The apparent multiplicity of Gods is bewildering at the first glance; but you presently discover that they are all the same one God in different aspects and functions and even sexes. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendent God includes all possible Gods… Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the profoundest Methodist and the crudest idolater are equally at home in it.
  Islam is very different, being ferociously intolerant. What I may call Manifold Monotheism becomes in the minds of very simple folk an absurdly polytheistic idolatry, just as European peasants not only worship Saints and the Virgin as Gods, but will fight fanatically for their faith in the ugly little black doll who is the Virgin of their own Church against the black doll of the next village. When the Arabs had run this sort of idolatry to such extremes … they did this without black dolls and worshipped any stone that looked funny, Mahomet rose up at the risk of his life and insulted the stones shockingly, declaring that there is only one God, Allah, the glorious, the great… And there was to be no nonsense about toleration. You accepted Allah or you had your throat cut by someone who did accept him, and who went to Paradise for having sent you to Hell. Mahomet was a great Protestant religious force, like George Fox or Wesley….
  There is actually a great Hindu sect, the Jains, with Temples of amazing magnificence, which abolish God, not on materialist atheist considerations, but as unspeakable and unknowable, transcending all human comprehension.
  • Letter to the Reverend Ensor Walters (1933), as quoted in Bernard Shaw : Collected Letters, 1926-1950 (1988) by Dan H. Laurence, p. 305

• A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
  • Everybody’s Political What’s What (1944), Ch. 30, p. 256

• We have no reason to suppose that we are the Creator’s last word.
  • Everybody’s Political What’s What (1944)

• I am a communist, but not a member of the Communist Party. Stalin is a first rate Fabian. I am one of the founders of Fabianism and as such very friendly to Russia.
  • As quoted in the Evening Herald in Dublin, Ireland (February 3, 1948), reprinted in Economic Council Letter, Issue 278, Part 397 (1952), p. 1807 [1]

• The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.
  • As quoted in Days with Bernard Shaw (1949) by Stephen Winsten

• The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people.
  • As quoted in Days with Bernard Shaw (1949) by Stephen Winsten

• Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.
  • As quoted in Bernard Shaw : The Lure of Fantasy (1991) by Michael Holroyd

• The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.
  • Preface to English Prisons Under Local Government by Sydney and Beatrice Webb (1922)

• Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author’s equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.
  • Preface to London music in 1888-89 as heard by Corno di Bassetto (1937)

• The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.
  • Preface to Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence (1931)

• I know I began as a passion and have ended as a habit, like all husbands.
  • The Simpleton of the Unexpected Isles, Act 2 (1934)

• A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
  • George Bernard Shaw, quoted by Hesketh Pearson, George Bernard Shaw: His Life and Personality, 1942

• Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. Creeds, articles, and institutes of religious faith ossify our brains and make change impossible. As such they are nuisances, and in practice have to be mostly ignored.
  • Everybody’s Political What’s What? (ebook, must be borrowed) (1944), Chapter XXXVII: Creed and Conduct, p. 330

Attributed

• England and America are two countries divided [separated] by a common [the same] language. (attributed to Shaw despite not appearing in his writings, see Oxford Dictionary of Quotations [4th edn., p. 638, quote no. 31]. See also Esar & Bentley, 1951, Treasury of Humorous Quotations; earlier attributed to Shaw in the Reader’s Digest, November 1942.)
  • The quotation is thought to derive from an Oscar Wilde short story, where the following appears: “Indeed, in many respects, she was quite English, and was an excellent example of the fact that we have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language” (Wilde, “The Canterville Ghost”, 1887). See Rees, Nigel (14 September 2000). “Quote… Unquote”: Current Most Frequently Asked Questions” (BBC Radio 4 programme webpages). Accessed 13 December 2022.
• The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.
  • Widely attributed to Shaw from the 1970s onward, but not known to exist in his published works. It is in keeping with some of his sardonic statements about the purposes and effectiveness of schools. First known attribution in print is in Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1971), “G. B. Shaw’s line that the only time his education was interrupted was when he was in school captures the sense of this alienation.”
• Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire. (attributed by George Melly in 1962, see Dancing Is a Perpendicular Expression of a Horizontal Desire. Quote Investigator..

Disputed

• If you’re going to tell people the truth, you better make them laugh; otherwise they’ll kill you.
  • Credited to Shaw in the lead in to the mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2004) and other recent works, but this or slight variants of it are also sometimes attributed to W. C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, and Oscar Wilde. It might possibly be derived from Shaw’s statement in John Bull’s Other Island (1907): “My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.“
  • Another possibility is that it is derived from Shaw’s characteristic of Mark Twain: “He has to put things in such a way as to make people who would otherwise hang him believe he is joking.”
  • Variants:
  • If you are going to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh. Otherwise, they’ll kill you.
  • If you’re going to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh. Otherwise, they’ll kill you.

• [Isadora Duncan] wrote to George Bernard Shaw: “Will you be the father of my next child? A combination of my beauty and your brains would startle the world,” but he replied: “I must decline your offer with thanks, for the child might have my beauty and your brains.”
  • Anecdote presented in “Isadore Duncan : Dancer as Plaything of Fate” in A Century of Sundays : 100 years of Breaking News in the Sunday Papers (2006), by Nadine Dreyer, p. 65; the anecdote provided here does not cite earlier sources, and though widely attributed to an exchange between Duncan and Shaw, the earliest form of it yet located is in 10,000 Jokes, Toasts & Stories (1939) by Lewis & Faye Copeland, which simply has an unidentified woman offering to have a child with Shaw, saying “think of the child with your brains and my beauty” and him replying “But what if he were to have your brains and my beauty?“

• Shaw: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?
  Actress: My goodness, Well, I’d certainly think about it
  Shaw: Would you sleep with me for a pound?
  Actress: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!
  Shaw: Madam, we’ve already established that. Now we are haggling over the price.
  • Similar remarks are also attributed to Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx and to Mark Twain

• 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. The world must doubtless attach high value to the predictions of great men like me. I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today. The medieval ecclesiastics, either through ignorance or bigotry, painted Muhammadanism in the darkest colours. They were in fact trained both to hate the man Muhammad and his religion. To them Muhammad was Anti-Christ. 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. I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much-needed peace and happiness. But to proceed, it was in the 19th century that honest thinkers like Carlyle, Goethe and Gibbon perceived intrinsic worth in the religion of Muhammad, and thus there was some change for the better in the European attitude towards Islam. But the Europe of the present century is far advanced. It is beginning to be enamoured of the creed of Muhammad.
  • Interview (April 1935), as quoted in The Genuine Islam, Vol. 1 (January 1936). A portion of the statement also appears quoted in The Islamic Review, Vol. 24 (1936) edited by Khwaja Kamal-ud-Din, p. 263

• I hold the Prophet of Arabia in great esteem and I can quite understand that it would have been impossible to restrain and wean that illiterate and perverse race, sunk in the miasma of utter moral depravity, from committing the most heinous of crimes, and imbue its people with enthusiasm to strive after righteousness and assimilate high morals and virtues, without projecting such a terrible and intensely awe inspiring spectacle of Hell and an equally captivating and enticing image of a land flowing with milk and honey to represent Heaven before their vision.
  • Interview (April 1935) in The Genuine Islam, Vol. 1, No. 8 (1936), as quoted at “A Shavian and a Theologian” at World Islamic Mission

Misattributed

• If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
  • George Bernard Shaw never said these words, but Charles F. Brannan did.[2]

• In my view, Anglo-Irish history is for Englishmen to remember, for Irishmen to forget.
  • Ireland in the New Century (1904) by Horace Plunkett
    • Often quoted as: Irish history is something no Englishman should forget and no Irishman should remember.

• You can’t make a man a Christian unless you first make him believe he is a sinner.
  • Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (1937), p. 17

• A: Would you sleep with me for $1,000,000?
  B: …YES!
  A: How about $1?
  B: What do you think I am?
  • “The role of the character initiating the proposal in this anecdote has been assigned to George Bernard Shaw, Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx, Mark Twain, W. C. Fields, Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, Woodrow Wilson and others. However, the earliest example of this basic story found by QI did not spotlight any of the persons just listed […]
  • […] QI hypothesizes that this anecdote began as a fictional tale that was intended to be humorous with an edge of antagonism. The story was retold for decades. Famous men were substituted into the role of the individual making the proposition. Occasionally, the individual who received the proposition was also described as famous, but typically she remained unidentified.
  • […] In January 1937 the syndicated newspaper columnist O. O. McIntyre printed a version of the anecdote that he says was sent to him as a newspaper clipping. This tale featured a powerful Canadian-British media magnate and politician named Max Aitken who was also referred to as Lord Beaverbrook [MJLB]”:
    • Someone sends me a clipping from Columnist Lyons with this honey:
    • “They are telling this of Lord Beaverbrook and a visiting Yankee actress. In a game of hypothetical questions, Beaverbrook asked the lady: ‘Would you live with a stranger if he paid you one million pounds?’ She said she would. ‘And if be paid you five pounds?’ The irate lady fumed: ‘Five pounds. What do you think I am?’ Beaverbrook replied: ‘We’ve already established that. Now we are trying to determine the degree.”
      • Quote investigator cited 2013-07-10

• George Bernard Shaw is said to have told W.S.C.:
  Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend—if you have one.
  W.S.C. to G.B.S.:
  Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second—if there is one.
  • (Version given in Irrepressible Churchill: A Treasury of Winston Churchill’s Wit by Kay Halle, 1966)
  • Apocryphal, from 1946. See discussion at Winston Churchill#Misattributed, and detailed discussion at “Here are Two Tickets for the Opening of My Play. Bring a Friend—If You Have One”, Garson O’Toole, Quote Investigator, (March 25, 2012)

• The Bible is most dangerous book ever written on earth, keep it under lock and key.
  • From Why You Should Never be a Christian (1987) by Ishaq ‘Kunle Sanni and ‎Dawood Ayodele Amoo.

• The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
  • Widely attributed to Shaw, this quotation is actually of unknown origin.

• The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
  • The attribution to Shaw comes from Leadership Skills for Managers (2000) by Marlene Caroselli, p. 71. But this quote seems more likely to come from William H. Whyte.The Biggest Problem in Communication Is the Illusion That It Has Taken Place. Quote Investigator (2014-08-31). Retrieved on 2015-11-09.

• Success does not consist in never making blunders, but in never making the same one a second time.
  • H. W. Shaw (Josh Billings), as quoted in Scientific American, Vol. 31 (1874), p. 121, and in dictionaries of quotations such as Excellent Quotations for Home and School (1890) by Julia B. Hoitt, p. 117 and Many Thoughts of Many Minds: A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age (1896) by Louis Klopsch, p. 266.

• I learned long ago never to wrestle with a pig. … You get dirty and besides the pig likes it.
  • Initially attributed to Cyrus S. Ching in Time, Vol. 56 (1950), p. 21. Also attributed to Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln: Quote Investigator July 8, 2017.

Quotes about Shaw

• Shaw’s plays are the price we pay for Shaw’s prefaces.
  • James Agate, diary entry (10 March 1933)

• Shaw knows at any moment, on any subject, what he thinks, what you will think, what others have thought, what all this thinking entails; and he takes the most elaborate pains to bring these thoughts to light in a form which is by turns abstract and familiar, conciliatory and aggressive, obvious and inferential, comic and puzzling. In a word, Shaw is perhaps the most consciously conscious mind that has ever thought — certainly the most conscious since Rousseau; which may be why both of them often create the same impression of insincerity amounting to charlatanism. Yet it is by excess of honesty that Shaw himself lent color to his representation as an inconsequential buffoon bent on monopolizing the spotlight.
  • Jacques Barzun, in “Bernard Shaw in Twilight” in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943)

• Seeing clearly within himself and always able to dodge around the ends of any position, including his own, Shaw assumed from the start the dual role of prophet and gadfly.
  • Jacques Barzun, in “Bernard Shaw in Twilight” in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943)

• Shaw does not merely decorate a proposition, but makes his way from point to point through new and difficult territory.
  • Jacques Barzun, in “Bernard Shaw in Twilight” in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943)

• He never invested his whole moral capital in a man, a book, or a cause, but treasured up wisdom wherever it could be picked up, always with scrupulous acknowledgment … His eclecticism saving him from the cycle of hope-disillusion-despair, his highest effectiveness was as a skirmisher in the daily battle for light and justice, as a critic of new doctrine and a refurbisher of old, as a voice of warning and encouragement. That his action has not been in vain, we can measure by how little Shaw’s iconoclasm stirs our blood; we no longer remember what he destroyed that was blocking our view.
  • Jacques Barzun, in “Bernard Shaw in Twilight” in The Kenyon Review (Summer 1943)

• Bernard Shaw remains the only model we have of what the citizen of a democracy should be: an informed participant in all things we deem important to the society and the individual.
  • Jacques Barzun “Bernard Shaw,” in A Jacques Barzun Reader: Selections from his works (2002), p. 231

• Mr. Shaw cannot realise his own pertness, nor can he preserve his own gravity, for more than a few moments at a time. Even when he sets out to be funny for fun’s sake, he must needs always pretend that there is a serious reason for the emprise; and he pretends so strenuously that he ends by convincing us almost as fully as he convinces himself. Thus the absurdity, whatever it be, comes off doubly well. Conversely, even when he is really engrossed in some process of serious argument, or moved to real eloquence by one of his social ideals, he emits involuntarily some wild jape which makes the whole thing ridiculous — as ridiculous to himself as to us; and straightway he proceeds to caricature his own thesis till everything is topsy-turvy; and we, rolling with laughter, look up and find him no longer on his head, but on his heels, talking away quite gravely; and this sets us off again. For, of course, when seriousness and frivolity thus co-exist inseparably in a man, the seriousness is nullified by the frivolity. The latter is fed by the former, but, graceless and vampire-like, kills it. As a teacher, as a propagandist, Mr. Shaw is no good at all, even in his own generation. But as a personality he is immortal.
  Posterity will not, I fancy, read his writings. He has not enough of the specific art-sense for writing. I will not exasperate him by complaining that he has no sense of beauty in the use of his medium: the idea of beauty is a red rag to him, as we know. I will merely suggest that he has in his writing the qualities of a public speaker rather than of a writer. He does not write with that closeness which is the result not of haste but of leisure, and which is the main secret of good literature. He is too glib, too fluent, too diffuse, and too loud. Glibness and fluency, loudness and diffusion, are just the qualities needed for addressing an audience. But between speaking and writing there is a vast difference. A good writer cannot make good speeches, and Mr. Shaw’s seems an instance to prove that a good speaker cannot write well. We, his contemporaries, can read him with delight, even though we seem to miss the reporter’s interpolation of “laughter”, “cheers”, “interruption”, and so forth. But relentlessly, in course of time, lack of solid form “tells on” writing. However interesting a writer may be, he will not, unless he be a strict artist, be read by posterity. Style, as has been said, is the one antiseptic. But, though Mr. Shaw’s writing be not good enough for the next generation, he himself, being so signally unique, is good enough for all time. I wish I had the leisure to be his Boswell, and he the kindness to be my Johnson.
  • Max Beerbohm, in “A Cursory Conspectus of G. B. S.” in The Saturday Review of Politics, Science and Art (2 November 1901)

• The writers of our century delight in the weaknesses of the human condition; the only one capable of inventing heroes was Bernard Shaw.
  • Jorge Luis Borges, Obra Completa (1996), Vol. IV, p. 487

• “God spare you, reader, of long prefaces”. That was written by Quevedo, who, in order not to commit an anachronism that would have been found out in the long run, never read Shaw´s.
  • Jorge Luis Borges, Obra Completa (1996), Vol. II, p. 400

• He was a Tolstoy with jokes, a modern Dr Johnson, a universal genius who on his own modest reckoning put even Shakespeare in the shade.
  • John Campbell, The Independent, as quoted in Penguin Classics edition of Plays Unpleasant (1946)

• In his works Shaw left us his mind … Today we have no Shavian wizard to awaken us with clarity and paradox, and the loss to our national intelligence is immense.
  • John Carey, The Sunday Times, as quoted in Penguin Classics edition of Plays Unpleasant (1946)

• I never read a reply by Shaw that did not leave me in better and not worse temper or frame of mind; which did not seem to come out of inexhaustible fountains of fairmindedness and intellectual geniality; which did not savor somehow of that native largeness which the philosophers attributed to Magnanimous Man.
  • G. K. Chesterton, commenting on twenty years of debate with Shaw on political, religious and other social issues.

• He said that one should never tell a child anything without letting him hear the opposite opinion. That is to say, when you tell Tommy not to hit his sick sister on the temple, you must make sure of the presence of some Nietzscheite professor, who will explain to him that such a course might possibly serve to eliminate the unfit. When you are in the act of telling Susan not to drink out of the bottle labelled “poison,” you must telegraph for a Christian Scientist, who will be ready to maintain that without her own consent it cannot do her any harm. What would happen to a child brought up on Shaw’s principle I cannot conceive; I should think he would commit suicide in his bath.
  • G. K. Chesterton: George Bernard Shaw. 1909. p. 174.

• What a debt every intelligent being owes to Bernard Shaw!
  • John Maynard Keynes, “One of Wells’ Worlds” (Review of the World of William Clissold”) in The New Republic (1 February 1927)

• Shaw and Stalin are still satisfied with Marx’s picture of the capitalist world… They look backwards to what capitalism was, not forward to what it is becoming.
  • John Maynard Keynes,”Stalin-Wells Talk: The Verbatim Report and A Discussion”, G.B. Shaw, J.M. Keynes et al., London, The New Statesman and Nation, (1934) p. 34

• Shaw was a very great man indeed. The danger is that when all the froth and nonsense about his being a philosopher has died down (as it must) a reaction should set in and lead people to forget  his real genius. He was a comedian, in his own time, of the very highest order … He was a humorist of the more intellectual kind, a master of satire, art and fantasy like Gilbert, Wilde and Aristophanes. In that class no one had more continuous vitality. He is also, in his prefaces, one of the great masters of plain prose. I have often, in that capacity, held him up as a model to my pupils and have learned much from him myself. Peace to his ashes!
  • C. S. Lewis, in “Comedian of Highest Order”, in The Mark Twain Journal, Vol. 9, no. 4 (Summer 1954), p. 10

• He did his best in redressing the fateful unbalance between truth and reality, in lifting mankind to a higher rung of social maturity. He often pointed a scornful finger at human frailty, but his jests were never at the expense of humanity.
  • Thomas Mann, as quoted in Penguin Classics edition of Plays Unpleasant (1946)

• Desmond MacCarthy, whom I tried to persuade to write a new appreciation of Shaw in old age, noticed a real deterioration in Shaw himself. The Shaw who had praised Mussolini and justified Hitler grew increasingly irresponsible in suggesting that people who were a nuisance should be killed. This strain in Shaw, and his characteristic inconsistency when he dropped back suddenly into individualism, after maintaining the State’s right to liquidate anyone it disapproved of, had been growing steadily stronger from Major Barbara onwards. He ceased to have a genuine humanism such as he had shown in the splendid preface to John Bull’s Other Island. In general, re-reading Shaw, MacCarthy said he could find nothing but “a chaos of clear ideas”.
  • Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931-45 (1968), p. 110

• He understood early the weakness of democracy; he was naturally impatient with the shallow humbug of much political talk. There was so much in it to laugh at, and so much to expose, that he even allowed himself to praise Mussolini and Hitler and to excuse all the darker deeds of Stalin. In 1948 he sent me a letter describing Russia as a democracy in which Stalin would be pushed out of power in ten minutes if he offended the majority of the Communist Party.
  • Kingsley Martin, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931-45 (1968), p. 112

• Shaw presumes that his friend Stalin has everything under control. Well, Stalin may have made special arrangements to see that Shaw comes to no harm, but the rest of us in Western Europe do not feel quite so sure of our fate,especially those of us who do not share Shaw’s curious admiration for dictators.
  • J. B. Priestley, The War – And After, in Horizon magazine (January 1940), reprinted in War Decade : An Anthology of the 1940s (1989) by Andrew Sinclair

• One may say that he [Shaw] did much good and some harm. As an iconoclast he was admirable, but as an eikon rather less so.
  • Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956)

• [Shaw] had just learned, more less, to ride a bicycle. And I went out for a country ride with him, and at the bottom of a steep hill the road forked and I didn’t know which way to go, and Shaw was behind me. And I got off my bicycle to ask which way we should go. And he wasn’t able to manage his machine, and he ran slap into my bicycle. My bicycle buckled. He was precipitated 20 teet through the air and landed on his back on the hard road. He got up, his bicycle undamaged, rode home: I had to go home by train.
  • Bertrand Russell, in an interview with David Susskind (10 June 1962)

• I found many men to whom I felt deeply grateful — especially Guy de Maupassant, Jack London, and H. L. Mencken — but the first man to whom I felt definitely related was George Bernard Shaw. This is a presumptuous or fatuous thing to mention, perhaps, but even so it must be mentioned. … I myself, as a person, have been influenced by many writers and many things, and my writing has felt the impact of the writing of many writers, some relatively unknown and unimportant, some downright bad. But probably the greatest influence of them all when an influence is most effective — when the man being influenced is nowhere near being solid in his own right — has been the influence of the great tall man with the white beard, the lively eyes, the swift wit and the impish chuckle. … I have been fascinated by it all, grateful for it all, grateful for the sheer majesty of the existence of ideas, stories, fables, and paper and ink and print and books to hold them all together for a man to take aside and examine alone. But the man I liked most and the man who seemed to remind me of myself — of what I really was and would surely become — was George Bernard Shaw.
  • William Saroyan, Hello Out There (1941)

• Shaw is a pleasant man, simple, direct, sincere, animated; but self-possessed, sane, and evenly poised, acute, engaging, companionable, and quite destitute of affectation. I liked him.
  • Mark Twain, after meeting Shaw in 1907

• His argument seems to be that either the Haves or the Have-Nots must seize power and compel all to come under the Fascist or the Communist plough. It is a crude and flippant attempt at reconstruction, bred of conceit, impatience and ignorance. … [I]t reinforces the Italian tyranny. It is only fair to add that this naïve faith in a Superman before whose energy and genius all must bow down is not a new feature in the Shaw mentality. What is new and deplorable is the absence of any kind of sympathetic appreciation of the agony that the best and wisest Italians are today going through; any appreciation of the mental degradation as implied in the suppression of all liberty of thought and speech.
  • Beatrice Webb’s diary (1927), quoted in Beatrice Webb, Diaries: 1924-1932, ed. Margaret Cole (1952), p. 155

• The worst element in his mental make-up is a queer readiness to succumb to the poses of excessive virility. His soul goes down before successful force. He exalted the maker of enormous guns in Man and Superman; he has rejoiced in the worst claptrap of the Napoleonic legend; now he is striking attitudes of adoration towards the poor, vain, doomed biped who is making Rome horrible and ridiculous to all the world. When it comes to the torture of intelligent men, to vile outrages on old women, to the strangulation of all sane criticism and an orgy of claptrap more dreadful than its attendant cruelties, this vituperative anti-vivisectionist becomes an applauding spectator.
  • H. G. Wells, The Way The World Is Going (1929), p. 279

• Uncle Wells was as magnificent an uncle as one could hope to have. So, too, was Uncle Shaw. He brought his mind for the children to look at, his marvellous shining mind. Too thin a mind, Philistines would object; but the very finest French watches are as thin as a couple of halfcrowns and yet keep better time than the grosser article. He did for his age what Voltaire and Gibbon did for theirs: he popularized the use of the intellectual processes among the politically effective class. And he did it with such style.
  • Rebecca West, The Strange Necessity. Doubleday, Doran, Incorporated, 1928 (pp. 216-217).

• In fact, the real problem with the thesis of A Genealogy of Morals is that the noble and the aristocrat are just as likely to be stupid as the plebeian. I had noted in my teens that major writers are usually those who have had to struggle against the odds — to “pull their cart out of the mud,” as I put it — while writers who have had an easy start in life are usually second rate — or at least, not quite first-rate. Dickens, Balzac, Dostoevsky, Shaw, H. G. Wells, are examples of the first kind; in the twentieth century, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Samuel Beckett are examples of the second kind. They are far from being mediocre writers; yet they tend to be tinged with a certain pessimism that arises from never having achieved a certain resistance against problems.
  • Colin Wilson in The Books In My Life, p. 188