George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
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Grain by grain, a loaf. Stone upon stone, a palace.
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Girls, like men, want to be petted, pitied, and made much of, when they are diffident, in low spirits, or in unrequited love. These are services which the weak cannot render to the strong and which the strong will not render to the weak, except when there is also a difference of sex.
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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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Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.
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Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. 'A miracle a minute' would not be a bad slogan for God.
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A pornographic novelist is one who exploits the sexual instinct as a prostitute does. A legitimate sex novel elucidates it or brings out its poetry, tragedy, or comedy.
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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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Sherlock Holmes was a drug addict without a single amiable trait.
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After all, the wrong road always leads somewhere.
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When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind.
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Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool.
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Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
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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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During the last considerable epidemic at the turn of the century, I was a member of the Health Committee of London Borough Council, and I learned how the credit of vaccination is kept up statistically by diagnosing all the revaccinated cases (of smallpox) as pustular eczema, varioloid or what not---except smallpox.
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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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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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Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.
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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.
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Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.
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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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He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
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A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.