Top 1385 Quotes & Sayings by George Bernard Shaw - Page 3

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

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.

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

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

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

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

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

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

General consultant to mankind.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

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.

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.

I want to be all used up when I die.

Syllables govern the world.

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

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

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

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

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

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

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.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

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

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

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 British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

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

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

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

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

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.

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

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

My reputation grows with every failure.

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

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

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

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.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

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

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

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

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

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.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.