George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

In the arts of peace Man is a bungler.

What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.

The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.

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

Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.

Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.

Poverty doesn't bring unhappiness; it brings degradation.

Don't waste time collecting other people's autographs; rather devote it to making your own autograph worth collecting.

Words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap

Life is too short for men to take it seriously.

It's not that I'm so clever, it is that others are so stupid.

People exaggerate the value of things they haven't got everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with them

Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.

But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things.

It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something.

A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.

Seemingly unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. Much progress, therefore, depends on such people.

Vegetarians claim to be immune from most diseases but they have been known to die from time to time.

Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you treat fortune tellers.

I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend... if you have one.

Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.

Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse.

God is on the side of the big battalions.

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it.

He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.

In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.

I like a bit of mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog.

Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.

There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.

I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everybody there looks an original. All other nations are obviously mass produced.

The degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion.

It's prudent to gain the whole world and lose your own soul. But don't forget that your soul sticks to you if you stick to it; but the world has a way of slipping through your fingers.

If the English can survive their food, they can survive anything.

A conquered nation is like a man with cancer: he can think of nothing else.

When your eyes are fixed in the stare of unconsciousness, and your throat coughs the last gasping breath - as one dragged in the dark to a great precipice - what assistance are a wife and child?

The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.