George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Uniqueness Leads To Great Success Some men see things as they are and say 'why?' I dream things that never were, and say, 'why not?' --George Bernard Shaw English Dramatist (1856-1950) ~ John Paul Carinci

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

The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The art of manipulating public opinion, which is a necessary art for the democratic politician, and, like other arts, is sometimespractised with greater virtuosity by knaves than by honest men (who are apt to disdain it), has a different technique in different countries. For instance, in England we excel in whitewashing: in America they excel in tarring and feathering. We strain our nerves and stretch our consciences to avoid a scandal: Americans do the same to make one. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

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

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

The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

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. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Though justice be Thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That's right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That's democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Literature is too full of 'acknowledgments' and squabbles about originality ... ~ George Bernard Shaw

Even to this day it is easier than it ought to be for me to get a rise out of an American by telling him something about himself which is equally true about every human being on the face of the globe. He at once resents this as a disparagement and an assertion on my part that people in other parts of the globe are not like that, and are loftily superior to such weaknesses. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

If a woman rebels against high-heeled shoes, she should take care to do it in a very smart hat ~ 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

It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least. ~ George Bernard Shaw

People do not become great by doing great things. They do great things because they are great. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it. ~ George Bernard Shaw

In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as 1 percent of us could give physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

The fact is that the intrinsic worth of the book, play or whatever the author is trying to sell is the least, last factor in the the whole transaction. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble?Making life means making
trouble. There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

When Jennie, mother of Winston Churchill invited playwright George Bernard Shaw to lunch, he telegraphed: "Certainly not. What have I done to provoke such an attack on my well-known habits?" She replied, "Know nothing of your habits; hope they are better than your manners." ~ Anne Sebba

Faith in reason as a prime motor is no longer the criterion of the sound mind, any more than faith in the Bible is the criterion of righteous intention. ~ George Bernard Shaw

There is only one universal passion fear. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I am absolutely convinced of the lack of true scientific evidence in favour of Darwinian dogma. Nobody in the biological sciences, medicine included, needs Darwinism at all. Darwinism is certainly needed, however, in order to pose as a philosopher, since it is primarily a worldview. And an awful one, as George Bernard Shaw used to say. ~ Raul O. Leguizamon

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. ~ George Bernard Shaw

When a lion meets another with a louder roar the first lion thinks the last a bore. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish monk, was ~ George Bernard Shaw

Well, sir, you never can tell. That's a principle in life with me, sir, if you'll excuse my having such a thing. ~ George Bernard Shaw

It would positively be a relief to me to dig Shakespeare up and throw stones at him. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I don't believe in morality . I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw. ~ George Bernard Shaw

My wife thinks I think I'm such hot stuff. She's wrong. I don't think I'm such hot stuff.

My hero George Bernard Shaw, socialist, and shrewd and funny playwright, said in his eighties that if he was considered smart, he sure pitied people who were considered dumb. He said that, having lived as long as he had, he was at last sufficiently wise to serve as a reasonably competent office boy.

That's how I feel. ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

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

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

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Why not give Christianity a trial? ~ George Bernard Shaw

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. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Your uncle Howard is one of the most harmless of men - much nicer than most professional people. Of course he does dreadful things as a judge; but then if you take a man and pay him 5,000 pounds a year to be wicked, and praise him for it, and have policemen and courts and laws and juries to drive him into it so that he can't help doing it, what can you expect? ~ George Bernard Shaw

We educate one another; and we cannot do this if half of us consider the other half not good enough to talk to. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanginary execution after torture, for its central mystery is an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of equality and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

What's the use of money if you have to earn it. ~ George Bernard Shaw

We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry of our hearts. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount. ~ George Bernard Shaw

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Nowadays a parlor maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective. ~ 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

All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake. Not that it's wrong to try to improve the world if you know how but simply because struggling and striving are the worst possible ways to go about doing anything! ~ 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

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. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I would exchange every painting of Christ for one snapshot. ~ 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

The real moment of success is not the moment apparent to the crowd. ~ 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

We mustn't be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class. ~ 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

Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

An Irishman's heart is nothing but his imagination. ~ George Bernard Shaw

The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

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

There is nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. ~ George Bernard Shaw

In a hospital they throw you out into the street before you are half cured, but in a nursing home they don't let you out till you are dead. ~ George Bernard Shaw

An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers', like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I owe all my originality, such as it is, to my determination not to be a literary man. Instead of belonging to a literary club I belong to a municipal council. Instead of drinking and discussing authors and reviews, I sit on committees with capable practical greengrocers and bootmakers ... Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh. ~ George Bernard Shaw

One hardly knows which is the more appalling: the abjectness of the credulity or the flippancy of the scepticism.
- Shaw's Preface ~ George Bernard Shaw

If I refuse to allow my leg to be amputated, its mortification and my death may prove that I was wrong; but if I let the leg go, nobody can ever prove that it would not have mortified had I been obstinate. Operation is therefore the safe side for the surgeon as well as the lucrative side. ~ 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

Even under the most perfect Social Democracy we should, without Communism, still be living like hogs, except that each hog would get his fair share of grub ... Whilst we are hogs, let us at least be well-fed, healthy, reciprocally useful hogs, instead of
well, instead of the sort we are at present. ~ George Bernard Shaw

It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

Our language is the language of Shakespeare, Thompson and Milton, as we sit and croon like bilious pigeons. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

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

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

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

The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree. ~ George Bernard Shaw

When men die of disease they are said to die from
natural causes. When they recover (and mostly they do)
the doctor gets the credit of curing them. ~ George Bernard Shaw

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

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

Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance. ~ George Bernard Shaw

In heaven an angel is no one in particular. ~ 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