George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
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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.
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I worship you, Eve. I must have something to worship. Something quite different to myself, like you. There must be something greater than the snake.
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Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.
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A 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.
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Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
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No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
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The British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding.
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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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The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
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If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it.
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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.
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Schools must not become the agencies through which propaganda advocated by any section of society is spread. The method of control always a crucial problem should be in harmony with the fundamental values and principles of the states...
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Emotional excitement reaches men through tea, tobacco, opium, whisky, and religion.
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The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.
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All roads end at the grave, which is the gate to nothingness.
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After all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.
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Once the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible, we crucified it.
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Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.
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The wheels are turning, but the hamsters are all dead. Make it idiot-proof and someone will make a better idiot.
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The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
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To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.
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Even if animal experimentation was proved to be of value, it would be morally wrong.
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Morality is not respectability.