George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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For nearly twenty years I have been a published author... But I have never yet seen a book of mine offered for sale in a shop window.
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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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Morality is not respectability.
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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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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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Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.
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When you want to put something into your part that is not in the play, you must ask the author-or some other author-to lead up to the interpolation for you. Never forget that the effect of a line may depend not on its delivery, but on something said earlier in the play, either by somebody else or by yourself, and that if you change it, it may be necessary to change the whole first act as well.
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Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.
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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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I like a bit of a mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog; they're the best for every day.
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Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.
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I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.
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I learned more from the first stupid woman who fell in love with me than ever my brains taught me.
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Opera is when a tenor and soprano want to make love, but are prevented from doing so by a baritone.
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Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
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The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
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The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
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The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.
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Worst of all, there is no sign of any relaxation of antisemitism. Logically it has nothing to do with Fascism. But the human raceis imitative rather than logical; and as Fascism spreads antisemitism spreads.
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My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.
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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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It is nearly 50 years since I was assured by a conclave of doctors that if I did not eat meat I should die of starvation.
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I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.
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We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time, or we shall stick in the mud. Yet neither must we undertake a new world as catastrophic Utopians, and wreck our civilization in our hurry to mend it.