George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

Nobel Prize money is a life-belt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.

The sound body is the product of the sound mind.

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination.

New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.

It is not that I am so clever; it is that everyone else is so stupid.

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

Heartbreak is life educating us.

Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.

If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.

Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.

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.

And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.

The whole world is strewn with snares, traps, gins and pitfalls for the capture of men by women.

Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous.

[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all.

At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.

Every Englishman believes that Handel now occupies an important position in heaven. If so, le bon Dieu must feel toward him very much as Louis Treize felt toward Richelieu.

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.

History, sir, will tell lies as usual.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.

All sorts of bodily diseases are produced by half-used minds.

Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.

My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I'm a free citizen.

Trade unionism is not socialism. It is the capitalism of the proletariat.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

A family is a tyranny ruled over by it's weakest member.

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.

Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

Revolutionary moments attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.

I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum

The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!

Security, the chief pretense of civilization, cannot exist where the worst of dangers, the danger of poverty, hangs over everyone's head.

A succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.