George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.
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There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates, who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.
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Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich-something for nothing.
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Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.
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I loathe the mess of mean superstitions and misunderstood prophecies which is still rammed down the throats of children under the name of Christianity.
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I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
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The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
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Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.
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Affection between adults - if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown up children - and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural.
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Instruction in sex is as important as instruction in food; yet not only are our adolescents not taught the physiology of sex, but never warned that the strongest sexual attraction may exist between persons so incompatible in tastes and capacities that they could not endure living together for a week much less a lifetime.
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An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
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Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
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I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.
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Vitality is a woman is a blind fury of creation.
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Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that. Why should I be filthy and inhuman? Why should I be an accomplice in the wholesale horror and degradation of the slaughter-house?
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All roads end at the grave, which is the gate to nothingness.
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Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.
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Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.
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Social progress takes effect through the replacement of all institutions by new ones; and since every institution involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step.
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I also made it quite clear that Socialism means equality of income or nothing, and that under socialism you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly feed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live you would have to live well.
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Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.
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We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
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My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion.
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Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family.