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The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.
George Bernard Shaw -
Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend - if you have one. Telegram inviting Winston Churchill to opening night of Pygmalion. Churchill wired back: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second - if there is one.
George Bernard Shaw
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Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.
George Bernard Shaw -
All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
George Bernard Shaw -
All progress depends upon the unreasonable person.
George Bernard Shaw -
In truth , mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true : what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him.
George Bernard Shaw -
I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.
George Bernard Shaw -
Newspaper : A device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.
George Bernard Shaw
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Happiness and Beauty are by-products.
George Bernard Shaw -
The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.
George Bernard Shaw -
What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man's fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him?--as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!
George Bernard Shaw -
Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.
George Bernard Shaw -
Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.
George Bernard Shaw -
The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
George Bernard Shaw
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Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.
George Bernard Shaw -
Hypocrisy ... is only bad when it is improperly used.
George Bernard Shaw -
Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
George Bernard Shaw -
Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.
George Bernard Shaw -
The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.
George Bernard Shaw -
It is not true that men can be divided into absolutely honest persons and absolutely dishonest ones. Our honesty varies with the strain put on it.
George Bernard Shaw
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A mind of the caliber of mine cannot derive its nutrient from cows.
George Bernard Shaw -
Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing.
George Bernard Shaw -
The great dramatist has something better to do than to amuse either himself or his audience. He has to interpret life.
George Bernard Shaw -
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?
George Bernard Shaw