George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot.
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If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
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All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.
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At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.
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I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.
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I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
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Happiness and Beauty are by-products.
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Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.
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We are all victims of the violence that animals suffer... their liberation is also our liberation.
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The hand of the painter is incurably mechanical: his technique is incurably artificial... The camera... is so utterly unmechanical.
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Girls, like men, want to be petted, pitied, and made much of, when they are diffident, in low spirits, or in unrequited love. These are services which the weak cannot render to the strong and which the strong will not render to the weak, except when there is also a difference of sex.
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We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
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Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.
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The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.
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I have my own soul. My own spark of divine fire.
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When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
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If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.
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Don't waste time collecting other people's autographs; rather devote it to making your own autograph worth collecting.
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It is always necessary to overstate a cast startlingly to make people sit up and listen to it, and to frighten them into acting on it.
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A sensitive boy's humiliations may be very good fun for ordinary thick-skinned grown-ups; but to the boy himself theyareso acute, so ignominious, that he cannot confess themcannot but deny them passionately.
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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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Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
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If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.