George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

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

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

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

Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.

The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does NOT triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.

We know there is intention and purpose in the universe, because there is intention and purpose in us.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

Of the three official objects of our prison system: vengeance, deterrence, and reformation of the criminal, only one is achieved; and that is the one which is nakedly abominable.

You have nothing to do but mention the quantum theory, and people will take your voice for the voice of science, and belive anything.

The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn anything from history.

I want to be all used up when I die.

Those who understand evil pardon it.

The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.

Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

Property is organized robbery.

I was always unlawful; I broke the law when I was born because my parents weren't married.

The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

The popular definition of tragedy is heavy drama in which everyone is killed in the last act, comedy being light drama in which everyone is married in the last act.

The real pleasure of one's life is the devotion to a great objective of one's consideration.

From a very early age, I've had to interrupt my education to go to school.

Liberty is the breath of life to nations.

It is the highest creatures who take the longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity.

If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.

What is life but a series of inspired follies.

All progress depends upon the unreasonable person.

If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.

The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.

Indifference is the essence of inhumanity.

There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

The churches must learn humility as well as teach it.