George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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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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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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A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.
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It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.
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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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Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.
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All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
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Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance.
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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.
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Every step of progress means a duty repudiated, and a scripture torn up.
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Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat? Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.
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I knew if I waited around long enough something like this would happen.
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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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Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date.
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It is in the hour of trial that a man finds his true profession.
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Changeable women are more endurable that monotonous ones; they are sometimes murdered but never deserted.
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When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.
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A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
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The fact is that the intrinsic worth of the book, play or whatever the author is trying to sell is the least, last factor in the the whole transaction.
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Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
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It's just as unpleasant to get more than you bargain for as to get less.
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While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
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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.