George Bernard Shaw

From BillionQuotes

Jump to: navigation, search
Image:George bernard shaw.jpg
You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?

George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856-2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1925

Contents

[edit]

Sourced

  • My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
    • Answers to Nine Questions
  • We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
  • I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer.
    • Candida, Act III
  • We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.
  • The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.
    • You Never Can Tell, Act II
  • There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
    • Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant, Vol. II, preface (1898)
  • The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.
    • Three Plays for Puritans, Preface (1900)
  • The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
  • [Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.
    • The Irrational Knot (1905)
  • The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would suprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.
  • All great truths begin as blasphemies.
    • Annajanska (1919)
  • Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
    • The Rejected Statement, Pt. I
  • Political necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes.
  • Our natural dispositions may be good; but we have been badly brought up, and are full of anti-social personal ambitions and prejudices and snobberies. Had we not better teach our children to be better citizens than ourselves? We are not doing that at present. The Russians ARE. That is my last word. Think over it.
  • One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
    • The Apple Cart, Act I
  • I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.
  • An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.
    • Speech at New York (April 11, 1933)
  • You in America should trust to that volcanic political instinct which I have divined in you.
    • Speech at New York (April 11, 1933)
[edit]

The Philanderer (1893)

  • It's well to be off with the Old Woman before you're on with the New.
    • Act II
  • The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
    • Act II
  • The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
    • Act IV
[edit]

Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893)

  • People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.
    • Vivie, Act II
  • There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
    • Crofts, Act III
  • I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On.
    • Praed, Act IV
[edit]

Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)

  • Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar! I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day's deed, and think my night's thought.
  • My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God— nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?
  • THEODOTUS. Caesar: you are a stranger here, and not conversant with our laws. The kings and queens of Egypt may not marry except with their own royal blood. Ptolemy and Cleopatra are born king and consort just as they are born brother and sister.
    BRITANNUS (shocked). Caesar: this is not proper.
    THEODOTUS (outraged). How!
    CAESAR (recovering his self-possession). Pardon him. Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.
  • Again, there is the illusion of "increased command over Nature," meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man's increased command over Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us.
[edit]

Man and Superman (1903)

  • This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
    • Epistle Dedicatory
  • The schoolboy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him.
    • Epistle Dedicatory
  • ... our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment, will ruin us if our citizens are ill bred.
    • Epistle Dedicatory
  • We must either breed political capacity or be ruined by Democracy, which was forced on us by the failure of the older alternatives. Yet if Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters.
    • Epistle Dedicatory
  • Bunyan's perception that righteousness is filthy rags, his scorn for Mr Legality in the village of Morality, his defiance of the Church as the supplanter of religion, his insistence on courage as the virtue of virtues, his estimate of the career of the conventionally respectable and sensible Worldly Wiseman as no better at bottom than the life and death of Mr Badman: all this, expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a tinker's theology, is what Nietzsche has expressed in terms of post-Darwinian, post-Schopenhaurian philosophy; Wagner in terms of polytheistic mythology; and Ibsen in terms of mid-XIX century Parisian dramaturgy.
    • Epistle Dedicatory
  • A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
    • Act I
  • The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
    • Act I
  • The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
    • Tanner, Act I
  • Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a bloodsucker, a hypocrite and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy!
    • Tanner, Act I
  • Marry Ann; and at the end of a week you'll find no more inspiration in her than in a plate of muffins.
    • Act II
  • ... the book about the bee is natural history. It's an awful lesson to mankind. You think that you are Ann's suitor; that you are the pursuer and she the pursued; that it is your part to woo, to persuade, to prevail, to overcome. Fool: it is you who are the pursued, the marked down quarry, the destined prey. You need not sit looking longingly at the bait through the wires of the trap: the door is open, and will remain so until it shuts behind you for ever.
    • Tanner, Act II
  • In short, the way to avoid misunderstanding is for everybody to lie and slander and insinuate and pretend as hard as they can. That is what obeying your mother comes to.
    • Tanner, Act II
  • As he comes along the drive from the house with Mrs Whitefield he is sedulously making himself agreeable and entertaining, and thereby placing on her slender wit a burden it is unable to bear.
    • Act II
  • You can be as romantic as you please about love, Hector; but you mustn't be romantic about money.
    • Violet, Act II
  • If we were reasoning, farsighted people, four fifths of us would go straight to the Guardians for relief, and knock the whole social system to pieces with most beneficial reconstructive results. The reason we do not do this is because we work like bees or ants, by instinct or habit, not reasoning about the matter at all. Therefore when a man comes along who can and does reason, and who, applying the Kantian test to his conduct, can truly say to us, If everybody did as I do, the world would be compelled to reform itself industrially, and abolish slavery and squalor, which exist only because everybody does as you do, let us honor that man and seriously consider the advisability of following his example.
    • Act III
  • A movement which is confined to philosophers and honest men can never exercise any real political influence: there are too few of them. Until a movement shows itself capable of spreading among brigands, it can never hope for a political majority.
    • Mendoza, Act III
  • Abnormal professions attract two classes: those who are not good enough for ordinary bourgeois life and those who are too good for it. We are dregs and scum, sir: the dregs very filthy, the scum very superior.
    • Mendoza, Act III
  • Hell is the home of honor, duty, justice, and the rest of the seven deadly virtues. All the wickedness on earth is done in their name: where else but in hell should they have their reward?
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • 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.
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • Written over the gate here are the words "Leave every hope behind, ye who enter." Only think what a relief that is! For what is hope? A form of moral responsibility. Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.
    • The Statue, Act III
  • I was a hypocrite; and it served me right to be sent to heaven.
    • The Statue, Act III
  • ... for Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allows them to do.
    • The Devil, Act III
  • At every one of those concerts in England you will find rows of weary people who are there, not because they really like classical music, but because they think they ought to like it. Well, there is the same thing in heaven. A number of people sit there in glory, not because they are happy, but because they think they owe it to their position to be in heaven.
    • The Statue, Act III
  • The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool's paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer "Make me a healthy animal."
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • But Heaven cannot be described by metaphor. Thither I shall go presently, because there I hope to escape at last from lies and from the tedious, vulgar pursuit of happiness, to spend my eons in contemplation.
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • Senor Commander: I do not blame your disgust: a picture gallery is a dull place for a blind man. But even as you enjoy the contemplation of such romantic mirages as beauty and pleasure; so would I enjoy the contemplation of that which interests me above all things namely, Life: the force that ever strives to attain greater power of contemplating itself. What made this brain of mine, do you think? Not the need to move my limbs; for a rat with half my brains moves as well as I. Not merely the need to do, but the need to know what I do, lest in my blind efforts to live I should be slaying myself.
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • What a piece of work is man! says the poet. Yes: but what a blunderer! Here is the highest miracle of organization yet attained by life, the most intensely alive thing that exists, the most conscious of all the organisms; and yet, how wretched are his brains! Stupidity made sordid and cruel by the realities learnt from toil and poverty: Imagination resolved to starve sooner than face these realities, piling up illusions to hide them, and calling itself cleverness, genius! And each accusing the other of its own defect: Stupidity accusing Imagination of folly, and Imagination accusing Stupidity of ignorance: whereas, alas! Stupidity has all the knowledge, and Imagination all the intelligence.
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • And a pretty kettle of fish they make of it between them. Did I not say, when I was arranging that affair of Faust's, that all Man's reason has done for him is to make him beastlier than any beast. One splendid body is worth the brains of a hundred dyspeptic, flatulent philosophers.
    • The Devil, Act III
  • And is Man any the less destroying himself for all this boasted brain of his? Have you walked up and down upon the earth lately? I have; and I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine.
    The peasant I tempt to-day eats and drinks what was eaten and drunk by the peasants of ten thousand years ago; and the house he lives in has not altered as much in a thousand centuries as the fashion of a lady's bonnet in a score of weeks.
    But when he goes out to slay, he carries a marvel of mechanism that lets loose at the touch of his finger all the hidden molecular energies, and leaves the javelin, the arrow, the blowpipe of his fathers far behind.
    • The Devil, Act III
  • In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness.
    • The Devil, Act III
  • What is his religion? An excuse for hating ME. What is his law? An excuse for hanging YOU. What is his morality? Gentility! an excuse for consuming without producing. What is his art? An excuse for gloating over pictures of slaughter. What are his politics? Either the worship of a despot because a despot can kill, or parliamentary cockfighting.
    • The Devil, Act III
  • ...Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers.
    • The Devil, Act III
  • Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice. Yet all his civilization is founded on his cowardice, on his abject tameness, which he calls his respectability. There are limits to what a mule or an ass will stand; but Man will suffer himself to be degraded until his vileness becomes so loathsome to his oppressors that they themselves are forced to reform it.
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • Man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. He may be abject as a citizen; but he is dangerous as a fanatic. He can only be enslaved whilst he is spiritually weak enough to listen to reason.
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind. No: I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means."
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • I have had my share of vanity; for as a young man I was admired by women; and as a statue I am praised by art critics.
    • The Statue, Act III
  • Your friends are all the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dressed. They are not educated they are only college passmen. They are not religious: they are only pewrenters. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only "frail." They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal, they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not public spirited, only patriotic; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering; not self-controlled, only obtuse; not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated; not progressive, only factious; not imaginative, only superstitious; not just, only vindictive; not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all--liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls.
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • Yes, it is mere talk. But why is it mere talk? Because, my friend, beauty, purity, respectability, religion, morality, art, patriotism, bravery and the rest are nothing but words which I or anyone else can turn inside out like a glove. Were they realities, you would have to plead guilty to my indictment; but fortunately for your self-respect, my diabolical friend, they are not realities. As you say, they are mere words, useful for duping barbarians into adopting civilization, or the civilized poor into submitting to be robbed and enslaved. That is the family secret of the governing caste; and if we who are of that caste aimed at more Life for the world instead of at more power and luxury for our miserable selves, that secret would make us great.
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • Here there is nothing but love and beauty. Ugh! it is like sitting for all eternity at the first act of a fashionable play, before the complications begin. Never in my worst moments of superstitious terror on earth did I dream that Hell was so horrible. I live, like a hairdresser, in the continual contemplation of beauty, toying with silken tresses. I breathe an atmosphere of sweetness, like a confectioner's shopboy.
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • ... men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and a thousand times wearied of hell, as you are wearied now, you will no longer imagine that every swing from heaven to hell is an emancipation, every swing from hell to heaven an evolution. Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion. You will discover the profound truth of the saying of my friend Koheleth, that there is nothing new under the sun. Vanitas vanitatum.
    • The Devil, Act III
  • Were I not possessed with a purpose beyond my own I had better be a ploughman than a philosopher; for the ploughman lives as long as the philosopher, eats more, sleeps better, and rejoices in the bosom of his wife with less misgiving.
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
    • Don Juan, Act III
  • Well, well, go your way, Senor Don Juan. I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of any blundering universal force. I know that beauty is good to look at; that music is good to hear; that love is good to feel; and that they are all good to think about and talk about. I know that to be well exercised in these sensations, emotions, and studies is to be a refined and cultivated being. Whatever they may say of me in churches on earth, I know that it is universally admitted in good society that the prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me.
    • The Devil, Act III
  • As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.
    • The Devil, Act III
  • Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human.
    • The Devil, Act III
  • This Don Juan was kind to women and courteous to men as your daughter here was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such kindness is a denial of the exclusively human character of the soul.
    • The Devil, Act III
  • ANA. ...Tell me where can I find the Superman?
    THE DEVIL. He is not yet created, Senora.
    THE STATUE. And never will be, probably[...]
    ANA. Not yet created! Then my work is not yet done. [Crossing herself devoutly] I believe in the Life to Come. [Crying to the universe] A father--a father for the Superman!
    • Act III
  • [between his teeth] Goon. Talk politics, you idiots: nothing sounds more respectable. Keep it up, I tell you.
    • Mendoza, Act III
  • Hell is full of musical amateurs. Music is the brandy of the damned.
    • Act III
  • An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
    • Act III
  • What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
    • Act III
  • There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
    • Act IV
[edit]

Maxims for Revolutions

  • The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
  • He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
  • Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
  • If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.
  • Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
  • Lack of money is the root of all evil.
  • In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
  • Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.
  • Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
  • Happiness and beauty are by-products.
  • Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.
  • Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
  • What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
[edit]

Major Barbara (1905)

  • The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.
    • Preface
  • ...society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make. . .lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.
    • Preface
  • I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.
    • Act II
  • You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
  • Undershaft: You have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesnt fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year.
  • Cusins: Call you poverty a crime?
    Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.
[edit]

John Bull's Other Island (1907)

  • A healthy notion is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again. (Preface)
  • You can't be a hero without being a coward. (Preface)
  • What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.
[edit]

Getting Married (1908)

  • Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
    • Preface
  • When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
    • Preface
  • The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.
    • Hotchkiss
  • You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.
    • Mrs. George
  • Religion is a great force—the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows dont understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.
    • Hotchkiss
[edit]

Misalliance (1910)

  • It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.
    • Preface
  • Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.
    • Preface
  • I like a bit of a mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog; they're the best for every day.
    • Episode I
  • If parents would only realize how they bore their children!
    • Episode I
[edit]

The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)

  • Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.
    • Preface
  • Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
[edit]

Pygmalion (1912)

  • It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.
    • Preface
  • The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
    • Preface
  • 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.
    • Act II
  • What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day.
    • Act II
  • I don't want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady.
    • Liza, Act II
  • I have to live for others and not for myself; that's middle-class morality.
    • Act V
  • Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
    • Act V
[edit]

Androcles and the Lion (1913)

  • The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
  • Revolutionary movements attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.
[edit]

Back to Methuselah (1921)

  • You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?
    • Pt. I, Act I
  • The nauseous sham goodfellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.
    • Pt. II
  • There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.
    • Pt. III
  • Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
    • Pt. V
  • Silence is the perfect expression of scorn.
    • Pt. V
  • The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.
    • Pt. V
  • Life is not meant to be easy, my child but take courage: it can be delightful.
    • Pt. V
[edit]

A Treatise on Parents and Children

  • When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.
  • Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
[edit]

Attributed

  • A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
  • A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.
  • A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
  • All Shaw's characters are himself: Mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.
  • All great art and literature is propaganda.
  • America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between (also attributed to Oscar Wilde).
  • Animals are my friends ... and I don't eat my friends.
  • As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
  • Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
  • Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the airplane, the pessimist invents the parachute.
  • Dancing: The vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music.
  • Democracy is a system ensuring that the people are governed no better than they deserve.
  • Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
  • Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
  • Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
  • God help England if she had no Scots to think for her.
  • I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
  • I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
  • I don't believe in morality, I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw.
  • I have always held the religion of Muhammad in high estimation because of its wonderful vitality. It is the only religion which appears to me to possess that assimilating capacity to the changing phase of existence which can make itself appeal to every age. I have studied him - the wonderful man and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ, he must be called the Saviour of Humanity. I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world, he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much needed peace and happiness: I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today.
  • I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig, you get dirty; and besides, the pig likes it.
  • I often quote myself. I find it adds spice to the conversation.
  • If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange 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.
  • Irish history is something no Englishman should forget and no Irishman should remember.
  • It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
  • The greatest talker of his or any Age. (Talking about Oscar Wilde)
  • Martyrdom is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
  • Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
  • Most people would rather die sooner than think. In fact, they do so.
  • My speciality is being right when other people are wrong.
  • My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.
  • No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
  • Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
  • Progress can do nothing but make the most of us all, as we are.
  • Scratch an Englishman and find a Protestant.
  • The Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
  • The average age (life expectancy) of a meat eater is 63. I am on the verge of 85 and still work as hard as ever. I have lived quite long enough and I am trying to die; but I simply cannot do it. A single beefsteak would finish me; but I cannot bring myself to swallow it. I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.
  • The customs of your tribe are not laws of nature. (A variant that seems to be derived from a statement in Antony and Cleopatra)
  • The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
  • The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he cannot be believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
  • The main difference between the opposition of Islam to Hinduism and the opposition between Protestant and Catholic is that the Catholic persecutes as fiercely as the Protestant when he has the power; but Hinduism cannot persecute, because all the Gods - and what goes deeper, the no Gods - are to be found in its Temples.
  • The material of a dramatist is always some conflict of human feeling with circumstances.
  • The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.
  • The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
  • The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
  • The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. (Revolutionist's handbook)
  • The road to ignorance is paved with good editions.
  • The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people.
  • The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation.
  • There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
  • This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
  • (To a woman who wrote to him that she wanted to have children with him because she was beautiful and he was very intelligent. Therefore, their children would be intelligent and good looking.) What if our children are as ugly as I am and as silly as you are?
  • To understand a saint, you must hear the devils advocate; the same is true of an artist.
  • We have established what you are, madam. We are now merely haggling over the price.
  • When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.
  • Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
  • You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
  • You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul.
  • You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
  • Youth is wasted on the young.
[edit]

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:
Wikisource has original works written by or about George Bernard Shaw.


Wikiquote links: People - Literary Works - Proverbs - Films - TV Shows - Themes - Categories
ar:جورج برنارد شو

bg:Джордж Бърнард Шоу bs:Bernard Shaw cs:George Bernard Shaw de:George Bernard Shaw es:George Bernard Shaw fa:جورج برنارد شاو fr:George Bernard Shaw it:George Bernard Shaw he:ג'ורג' ברנרד שו lt:Bernardas Šo hu:George Bernard Shaw nl:Georg Bernard Shaw no:George Bernard Shaw pl:George Bernard Shaw pt:George Bernard Shaw ru:Шоу, Джордж Бернард sl:George Bernard Shaw sv:George Bernard Shaw ku:George Bernard Shaw

Retrieved from "http://www.billionquotes.com/index.php/George_Bernard_Shaw"
Personal tools