George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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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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Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.
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He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
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Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.
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Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.
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I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
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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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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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I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
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The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.
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All roads end at the grave, which is the gate to nothingness.
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The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.
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Taking all the round of professions and occupations, you will find that every man is the worse for being poor; and the doctor is a specially dangerous man when poor.
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I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
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It has taken me nearly twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public; and I am not sure that I am not still regarded as a suspicious character in some quarters.
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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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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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Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
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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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Sherlock Holmes was a drug addict without a single amiable trait.
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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.
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Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
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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.