George Bernard Shaw Quotes

In the arts of peace Man is a bungler.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Brains are not everything.

Audacious ribald: your laughter will finish in hideous boredom before morning.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.

With the exception of capitalism, there is nothing so revolting as revolution.

The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.

Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.

Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.

I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.

When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while to keep them.

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

Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity, except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition.

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

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

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

When commenting on the turmoil and disorder of the world, If the other planets are inhabited, they must be using this earth as their insane asylum.

I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.

Let no one suppose that the words doctor and patient can disguise from the parties the fact that they are employer and employee.

The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.

If the governments devalue the currency in order to betray all creditors, you politely call this procedure 'inflation'.

If more than 10% of the people like a painting, you can be sure it's bad.

Ladies and gentlemen are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool.

It is ridiculous to say that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is that the artist's business is not that of the policeman.

Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something.

People get tired of everything, and of nothing sooner than of what they most like.

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

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

It is feeling that sets a man thinking, and not thought that sets him feeling.

Assasination on the scaffold is the worst form of assasination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.

The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.

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.

A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.

Justice is impartiality. Only strangers are impartial.

What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.

In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win.

There is at bottom only one genuinely scientific treatment for all diseases, and that is to stimulate the phagocytes.

When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, "The one I feed the most."

I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.