George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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The real pleasure of one's life is the devotion to a great objective of one's consideration.
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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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When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind.
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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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Emotional excitement reaches men through tea, tobacco, opium, whisky, and religion.
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A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.
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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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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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Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.
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Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.
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The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty . . . . Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys basic people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.
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The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.
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Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.
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Money enables us to get what we want instead of what other people think we want.
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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 fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
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An Irishman's imagination never lets him alone, never convinces him, never satisfies him; but it makes him that he can't face reality nor deal with it nor handle it nor conquer it: he can only sneer at them that do, and be 'agreeable to strangers', like a good-for-nothing woman on the streets.
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Women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men.
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I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short- a gentlemanly gas deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel.
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Nationalism must now be added to the refuse pile of superstitions. We are now citizens of the world, and the man who divides the race into elect Irishmen and reprobate foreign devils (especially Englishmen) had better live on the Blaskets where he can admire himself without disturbance.
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I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.
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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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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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What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.