George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons...
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Life is a constant becoming: all stages lead to the beginning of others.
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Some of the things Mussolini has done, and some that he is threatening to do go further in the direction of Socialism than the English Labour Party could yet venture if they were in power.'
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Capitalism drives the employers to do their worst to the employed, and the employed to do the least for them. And it boasts all the time of the incentive it provides to both to do their best! . . . The reason the Capitalist system has worked so far without jamming for more than a few months at a time, and then only in places, is that it has not yet succeeded in making a conquest of human nature so complete that everybody acts on strictly business principles.
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I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for - scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself.
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The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.
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The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.
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Let no one suppose that the words doctor and patient can disguise from the parties the fact that they are employer and employee.
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In an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.
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If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.
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Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
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Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.
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Without danger I cannot be great. That is how I pay for Abel's blood. Danger and fear follow my steps everywhere. Without them courage would have no sense. And it is courage, courage, courage that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.
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Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.
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Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.
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There are scores of thousands of human insects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the Will of God on every possible subject...
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Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.
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I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.
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The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
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Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.
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Being a mother means that your heart is no longer yours; it wanders wherever your children do...
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The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy.
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I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
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A socialist is somebody who doesn't have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody.