George Bernard Shaw Quotes
-
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.
-
Gardening is the only unquestionably useful job.
-
Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.
-
The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.
-
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
-
It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
-
Though the Life Force supplies us with its own purpose, it has no other brains to work with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads.
-
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
-
Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.
-
The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary. rather tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven and making a prolonged and intolerable noise.
-
A man who desires to get married should know everything or nothing.
-
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
-
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.
-
If you demand my authorities for this and that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority.
-
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.
-
You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
-
Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
-
If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.
-
While browsing in a second-hand bookshop one day, George Bernard Shaw was amused to find a copy of one of his own works which he himself had inscribed for a friend: "To ----, with esteem, George Bernard Shaw." He immediately purchased the book and returned it to the friend with a second inscription: "With renewed esteem, George Bernard Shaw.
-
I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
-
Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.
-
Though justice be Thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy.
-
I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
-
Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.