George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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.
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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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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.
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Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
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It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.
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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!
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The shot Irishmen will now take their places beside Emmet and the Manchester Martyrs in Ireland, and beside the heroes of Poland and Sérbia and Belgium in Europe; and nothing in heaven or earth can prevent it.
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I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
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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.
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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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Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
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History, sir, will tell lies as usual.
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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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From a very early age, I've had to interrupt my education to go to school.
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You cannot learn to skate without making yourself ridiculous - the ice of life is slippery.
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The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.
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Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.
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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.
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I object to publishers: the one service they have done me is to teach me to do without them. They combine commercial rascality with artistic touchiness and pettishness, without being either good business men or fine judges of literature.
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The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.
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Most people do not pray; they only beg.
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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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The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.
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Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.