Top 1385 Quotes & Sayings by George Bernard Shaw - Page 4

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

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!

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.

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.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.

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.

Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. 'A miracle a minute' would not be a bad slogan for God.

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.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

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

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.

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.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

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

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

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

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.

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.

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.

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

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

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.

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

It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.

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.

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

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

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

It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

An index is a great leveller.

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

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

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

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

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

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

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

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.

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

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.

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

Write your Sad times in Sand, Write your Good times in Stone.

Newspaper : A device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.

It is not enough to know what is good: you must be able to do it.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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