George Bernard Shaw Quotes - Page 3

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

fights you on patriotic principles he robs you on business principles he enslaves you on imperial principles.

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

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

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.

The fickleness of the woman I love is equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it.

Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible.......Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. The people who get on in this world are they who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them make them.

My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say and then to say it with the utmost levity.

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.

My opportunities were still there nay they multiplied tenfold but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

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

But I cant stand saying one thing when everyone knows I mean another. Whats the use in such hypocrisy? If people arrange the world that way for women, theres no good pretending it’s arranged the other way...

I'm not a teacher: only a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you.

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.

Self-denial is not a virtue it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

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

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.

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.

An election is a moral horror as bad as a battle except for the blood a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blashphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and any one who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.

HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!

I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more

There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things." Henry Higgins, Act V, Pygmalion

A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself.

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.

When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age ask them how they would like to life in a stationary one and do without change.

The art of government is the organization of idolatry.

I believe in the discipline of silence and could talk for hours about it.

It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.

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

When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn't want to be a failure so I did ten times more work.

The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parents' first duty.

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentleman he may pronounce as he pleases.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

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

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man?DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

I was taught when I was young that if people would only love one another all would be well with the world. This seemed simple and very nice but I found when I tried to put it in practice not only that other people were seldom lovable but that I was not very lovable myself.

Well, I've known over thirty men who've found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment I suppose!

Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.

There is always danger for those who are afraid.

You can lose a man like that by your own death but not by his.

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us ashamed of ourselves of our relatives of our incomes of our accents of our opinion of our experience just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.

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