George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

Woman reduces us all to the common denominator.

An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country.

Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

The devil can quote Shakespeare for his own purpose.

Hate is the revenge of a coward intimidated.

A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a person's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.

Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.

A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.

An Englishman does everything on principle: he fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance.

I do not want to make my stomach a graveyard of dead animals.

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it.

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

In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

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

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.

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

My reputation grows with every failure.

Be like the sun and meadow, which are not in the least concerned about the coming winter.

Taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.

To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.

Patriotism is a word which always commemorates a robbery.

Most of my recent plays were written in the railway train between Hatfield and Kings Cross. I write anywhere, on the top of omnibuses or wherever I may be; it is all the same to me.

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

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?

The man who has never made a mistake will never make anything else.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out.

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

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.

To withhold deserved praise lest it should make its object conceited is as dishonest as to withhold payment of a just debt lest your creditor should spend the money badly.

The goal of an artist is to create the definitive work that cannot be surpassed.

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

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.

Hell is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

Everybody who does not live in a prostitute's bed and on a diet of cocaine snow is called an ascetic nowadays.

The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth.

The worst sin... is... to be indifferent.

Our prejudices are so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.

Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.

The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.

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

Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste.

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else.

Only fools repeat the same things over and over, expecting to obtain different results.

I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul.

The business man - the man to whom age brings golf instead of wisdom.