Top 1385 Quotes & Sayings by George Bernard Shaw - Page 23

I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns, as Johnson did, when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit

The best bought-up children are those who have seen thier parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the first duty of a parent.

Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

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.

People must not be forced to adopt me as their favourite author, even for their own good.

Idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality.

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.

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.

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.

If only for a half hour a day, a child should do something serviceable to the community

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

He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him

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

Communism, being the lay form of Catholicism, and indeed meaning the same thing, has never had any lack of chaplains.

My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately

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

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.

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

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

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.

Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?

When you want to put something into your part that is not in the play, you must ask the author-or some other author-to lead up to the interpolation for you. Never forget that the effect of a line may depend not on its delivery, but on something said earlier in the play, either by somebody else or by yourself, and that if you change it, it may be necessary to change the whole first act as well.

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.

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

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.

If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.

What is wrong with the prosaic Englishman is what is wrong with the prosaic men of all countries: stupidity.

The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all; it was Paul who converted the religion that has raised one man above sin and death.

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

This is my father. Try what you can with him! He won't listen to me, because he remembers what a fool I was when I was a baby.

When a prisoner sees the door of his dungeon open, he dashes for it without stopping to think where he shall get his dinner outside.

Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men.

As an old soldier, I admit the cowardice: it's as universal as seasickness, and matters just as little.

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle.

He who bears the brand of Cain shall rule the earth.

I occasionally swank a little because people like it; a modest man is such a nuisance.

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.

My opportunities were still there, nay, they multiplied tenfold; but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail, and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience.

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.

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.

Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.

He said that private practice in medicine ought to be put down by law. When I asked him why, he said that private doctors were ignorant licensed murders.

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

What, or who, led you to take up photography, and about what date ? George Bernard Shaw – I always wanted to draw and paint. I had no literary ambition. I aspired to be a Michelangelo, not a Shakespeare. But I could not draw well enough to satisfy myself; and the instruction I could get was worse than useless. So when dry plates and push buttons came into the market I bought a box camera and began pushing the button. It was in 1898.

If associations to control burglary and murder were tolerated we should take it for granted that the members should all be burglers and murderers.

Being hurt by someone you truly care about leaves a hole in you heart that only love can fill.

If pity is akin to love, gratitude is akin to the other thing.

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

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.

When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of "Orthodoxy, True and False" and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it soundslike.It isimpossible foran Englishmanto openhis mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.

In the arts of peace Man is a bungler.

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.

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.

This souls'prison we call England.

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

Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.

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.