George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
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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 British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
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A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
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The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.
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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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Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
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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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No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
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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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We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
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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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Money enables us to get what we want instead of what other people think we want.
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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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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.
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If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.
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Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
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Oh, come! That boot is on the other leg. 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...
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I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats.
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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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When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.
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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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Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.