George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider!
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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.
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What is the use of straining after an amiable view of things, when a cynical view is most likely to be the true one?
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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.
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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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Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words 'Remember that I too am mortal'.
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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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The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.
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At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox.
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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...
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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.
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In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
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Men trifle with their business and their politics but never trifle with their games. It brings truth home to them. They cannot pretend they have won when they have lost nor that they had a magnificent drive when they foozled it. The Englishman is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.
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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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When a bishop at the first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock round the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically... but that does not justify him in pretending...that Christ is, in effect, Mars.
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The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.
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Wise kings wear shabby clothes, and leave the gold lace to the drum major.
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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.
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The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.
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The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.
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Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
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Religion is a great force - the only real motive force in the world; but what you fellows don't understand is that you must get at a man through his own religion and not through yours.
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A family is a tyranny ruled over by it's weakest member.
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For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.