George Bernard Shaw Quotes
-
I must ... warn my readers that my attacks are directed against themselves, not against my stage figures.
-
The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
-
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
-
Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.
-
My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.
-
A mind of the caliber of mine cannot derive its nutrient from cows.
-
I lay my eternal curse on whomsoever shall now or at any time hereafter make schoolbooks of my works and make me hated as Shakespeare is hated. My plays were not designed as instruments of torture. All the schools that lust after them get this answer, and will never get any other.
-
We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
-
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.
-
Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentlemen.
-
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.
-
The haughty American nation ... makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a bootblack.
-
Even if animal experimentation was proved to be of value, it would be morally wrong.
-
During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I[urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enactingthat all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner's jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.
-
An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
-
Opera is when a tenor and soprano want to make love, but are prevented from doing so by a baritone.
-
I become more convinced that beings from other planets are using the Earth as a lunatic asylum...
-
Martyrdom is the only path to immortality that requires no talent whatsoever.
-
I wouldn't have ate it, only I'm too lady-like to take it out of my mouth.
-
Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.
-
We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time, or we shall stick in the mud. Yet neither must we undertake a new world as catastrophic Utopians, and wreck our civilization in our hurry to mend it.
-
Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.
-
The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all; it was Paul who converted the religion that has raised one man above sin and death.
-
Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men.