George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.
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The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.
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Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment.
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The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.
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The stock actor is a stage calamity...
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Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.
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The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.
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Your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!
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Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.
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You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.
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My opportunities were still there, nay, they multiplied tenfold; but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail, and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience.
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The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.
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At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.
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He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
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Every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up.
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Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.
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Most people do not pray; they only beg.
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A tranquil woman can go on sewing longer than an angry man can go on fuming.
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The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated.
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A succession of eye-openers each involving the repudiation of some previously held belief.
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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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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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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.
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I have my own soul. My own spark of divine fire.