George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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Even if animal experimentation was proved to be of value, it would be morally wrong.
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I make no vows. I take my chance. … It means that I fear certainty as you fear uncertainty. It means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.
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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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You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter;but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!
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Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.
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Nobody can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure time for freedom than unconventionality does.
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Nietzche . . . he was a confirmed Life Force worshipper. It was he who raked up the Superman, who is as old as Prometheus; and the 20th century will run after this newest of the old crazes when it gets tired of the world, the flesh, and your humble servant.
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The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.
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Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
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We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself.
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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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There is only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory. For without that you cannot be born again.
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When a lion meets another with a louder roar, the first lion thinks the last a bore.
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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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Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
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Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
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All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake. Not that it's wrong to try to improve the world if you know how but simply because struggling and striving are the worst possible ways to go about doing anything!
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Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
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Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.
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The devil can quote Shakespeare for his own purpose.
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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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A man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her.