George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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

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

Those who understand evil pardon it.

An English army led by an Irish general: that might be a match for a French army led by an Italian general.

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

You can't rationally argue out
what wasn't rationally argued in.

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

Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.

If you lived in London, where the whole system is one of false good-fellowship, and you may know a man for twenty years without finding out that he hates you like poison, you would soon have your eyes opened. There we do unkind things in a kind way: we say bitter things in a sweet voice: we always give our friends chloroform when we tear them to pieces.

The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.

What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man's fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him?
as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!

Self-denial is not a virtue; it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

Our lives are shaped not as much by our experiences as by our expectations.

Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions
I say the most licentious of human institutions: that is the secret of its popularity.And a woman seeking a husband is the most unscrupulous of all the beasts of prey. The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.

The only sensible person is my tailor. He measures me anew each time he sees me.

The British and Americans are two people separated by a common language.

Worst of all, there is no sign of any relaxation of antisemitism. Logically it has nothing to do with Fascism. But the human raceis imitative rather than logical; and as Fascism spreads antisemitism spreads.

All great art and literature is propaganda.

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

I know I began as a passion and have ended as a habit , like all husbands .

I try to follow his example, not to imitate him.

You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter;but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!

People don't have their virtues and vices in sets: they have them anyhow: all mixed.

Oh, well, if you want original conversations, you'd better go and talk to yourself.

All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more

Hypocrisy ... is only bad when it is improperly used.

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

Charles. Oh, your voices, your voices. Why don't the voices come to me? I am king, not you!

Joan. They do come to you, but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the angelus rings, you cross yourself and have done with it. But if you prayed from your heart and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air after they stopped ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do.

Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste.

Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words 'Remember that I too am mortal'.

People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

As to spelling the very frequent word though with six letters instead of two, it is impossible to discuss it, as it is outside the range of common sanity. In comparison such a monstrosity as phlegm for flem is merely disgusting.

The British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding.

I am the most spontaneous speaker in the world because every word, every gesture, and every retort has been carefully rehearsed.

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.

What is proposed is nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, conscious fertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the evolutionary process.

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.

Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date.

I say, if you hate cruelty, remember that nothing is so cruel in its consequences as the toleration of heresy!

Don't wait for the right opportunity: create it.

Unless the people can choose their leaders and rulers, and can revoke their choice at intervals long enough to test their measuresby results, the government will be a tyranny exercised in the interests of whatever classes or castes or mobs or cliques have this choice.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.

It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something.

Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.

I loathe the mess of mean superstitions and misunderstood prophecies which is still rammed down the throats of children under the name of Christianity.

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.

Get out of my way; for I won't stop for you.

[T]he most elaborate code of [law]... would still have left unspecified a hundred ways in which wreckers of Communism could have sidetracked it without ever having to face the essential questions: are you pulling your weight in the social boat? are you giving more trouble than you are worth? have you earned the privilege of living in a civilized community? That is why the Russians were forced to set up an Inquisition or Star Chamber, called at first the Cheka and now the Gay Pay Oo (Ogpu), to go into these questions and "liquidate" persons who could not answer them satisfactorily.

When God created man and woman, he did not take a patent. That's why any imbecile has been able to do so ever since.

The devil can quote Shakespeare for his own purpose.

The average age (longevity) of a meat eater is 63. I am on the verge of 85 and still work as hard as ever. I have lived quite long enough and am trying to die; but I simply cannot do it. A single beef-steak would finish me; but I cannot bring myself to swallow it. I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

A sensitive boy's humiliations may be very good fun for ordinary thick-skinned grown-ups; but to the boy himself theyareso acute, so ignominious, that he cannot confess themcannot but deny them passionately.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

Professor Henry Higgins: She's an owl, sickened by a few days of *my* sunshine.

The open mind never acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions.

The philosopher is Nature's pilot.

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.

We must be conventional, Jack, or we are so cruelly, so vilely misunderstood. Even you, who are a man, cannot say what you think without being misunderstood and vilified

Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors.

If you cannot attain knowledge without torturing a dog, you must do without knowledge.

The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.

You know, Tolstoy, like myself, wasn't taken in by superstitions like science and medicine.

We know there is intention and purpose in the universe, because there is intention and purpose in us.

If in the library of your house you do not have the works of the ancient Greek writers, then you live in a house with no light.

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

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

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

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

All Artists are Anarchists.

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

It is easy-terribly easy-to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to to break a man's spirit is Devil's work.

Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.

There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage.

I knew if I waited around long enough something like this would happen.

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

We throw the whole drudgery of creation on one sex, and then imply that no female of any delicacy would initiate any effort in that direction.

Every child has a right to its own bent ... It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father.

A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.

Women have been a ghastly nuisance in my life.

If you want soldiers you must have children. You can't buy 'em in boxes, like toy soldiers.

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

Morality is not respectability.

Lady Utterword: What a lovely night! It seems made for us. Hector: The night takes no interest in us. What are we to the night?

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it.

It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief

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

I don't like the idea of killing my fellow creatures in order to eat their dead bodies.

Schools must not become the agencies through which propaganda advocated by any section of society is spread. The method of control always a crucial problem should be in harmony with the fundamental values and principles of the states and the entire e

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

Whenever an obviously well founded statement is made in England by a person specially well acquainted with the facts, that unlucky person is instantly and frantically contradicted by all the people who obviously know nothing about it.

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

Iscussing vaccination with a doctor is like discussing vegetarianism with a butcher ...

Heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation