George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Social progress takes effect through the replacement of all institutions by new ones; and since every institution involves the recognition of the duty of conforming to it, progress must involve the repudiation of an established duty at every step.
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You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could.
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Defeatism is the wretchedest of policies.
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Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
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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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An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
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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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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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When men die of disease they are said to die from natural causes. When they recover (and mostly they do) the doctor gets the credit of curing them.
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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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I am the most spontaneous speaker in the world because every word, every gesture, and every retort has been carefully rehearsed.
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The Englishmen is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.
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I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.
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If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.
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Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. If all economists were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion.
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Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels.
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A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
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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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Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
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The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
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Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.
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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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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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History, sir, will tell lies as usual.