George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentlemen.
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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.
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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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I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blasphemous and demoralizing subject.
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While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth?
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There are scores of thousands of human insects who are ready at a moment's notice to reveal the Will of God on every possible subject...
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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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Martyrdom is the only path to immortality that requires no talent whatsoever.
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As 99 per cent of English authors and 100 per cent of American ones authors are just such imbeciles, managers and publishers make a practice of asking for every right the author possesses.
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The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist...
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The chief objection to playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player.
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The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
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A man ought to be able to be fond of his wife without making a fool of himself about her.
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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.
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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.
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There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have charge of children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.
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In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.
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The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.
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You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
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It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief.
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Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.
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The Englishmen is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.
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I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.