George Bernard Shaw Quotes

A thing that nobody believes cannot be proved too often.

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.

Any belief worth having must survive doubt

When an apparent miracle happened.it proved divine mission to the credulous, and proved a contract with the devil to the skeptical.

I never expect a soldier to think.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

I'm only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller.

All problems are finally scientific problems.

Rich men without convictions are more dangerous in modern society than poor women without chastity.

Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.

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

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

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

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

Justice is impartiality. Only strangers are impartial.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Some persons, by hating vice too much, come to love men too little. Hatred is self-punishment. Hatred is the cowards revenge for being intimidated.

When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.

Nowadays a parlor maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective.

What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it.

Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.

Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.

If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.

When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind.

Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date.

All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality conquers them.

Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.

An interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personalimportance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed.

The stock actor is a stage calamity

Those who admire modern civilization usually identify it with the steam engine and the electric telegraph.

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

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

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

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.

Let not the right side of your brain know what the left side doeth.

The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.

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

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

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

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

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