George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.
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Happiness and Beauty are by-products.
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Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend - if you have one. Telegram inviting Winston Churchill to opening night of Pygmalion. Churchill wired back: Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second - if there is one.
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If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
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Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.
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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.
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People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.
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The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
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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.
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Get out of my way; for I won't stop for you.
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In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.
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A man who desires to get married should know everything or nothing.
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Make money and the whole nation will conspire to call you a gentleman.
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The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
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It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
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All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
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A tranquil woman can go on sewing longer than an angry man can go on fuming.
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Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men.
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Changeable women are more endurable that monotonous ones; they are sometimes murdered but never deserted.
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Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.
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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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Without danger I cannot be great. That is how I pay for Abel's blood. Danger and fear follow my steps everywhere. Without them courage would have no sense. And it is courage, courage, courage that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.
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Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
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If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth - beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals - would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?