George Bernard Shaw Quotes
-
The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
-
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
-
Capitalism justified itself and was adopted as an economic principle on the express ground that it provides selfish motives for doing good, and that human beings will do nothing except for selfish motives...
-
Make money and the whole nation will conspire to call you a gentleman.
-
While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth?
-
We mustn't be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.
-
It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.
-
I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.
-
Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries.
-
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.
-
I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
-
A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.
-
No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare.
-
I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.
-
The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist...
-
Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good.
-
A family is a tyranny ruled over by it's weakest member.
-
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels.
-
There is a disease to which plays as well as men become liable with advancing years. In men it is called doting, in plays dating.The more topical the play the more it dates.
-
The art of manipulating public opinion, which is a necessary art for the democratic politician, and, like other arts, is sometimespractised with greater virtuosity by knaves than by honest men (who are apt to disdain it), has a different technique in different countries. For instance, in England we excel in whitewashing: in America they excel in tarring and feathering. We strain our nerves and stretch our consciences to avoid a scandal: Americans do the same to make one.
-
The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.
-
The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction.
-
For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.
-
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.