George Bernard Shaw Quotes
-
Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.
-
Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.
-
All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.
-
What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.
-
Changeable women are more endurable that monotonous ones; they are sometimes murdered but never deserted.
-
Treat persons who profess to be able to cure disease as you treat fortune tellers.
-
You're not a man, you're a machine.
-
If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.
-
The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.
-
Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it.
-
The chief objection to playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player.
-
I do not, like the Fundamentalists, believe that creation stopped six thousand years ago after a week of hard work. Creation is going on all the time.
-
Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
-
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.
-
The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.
-
The stock actor is a stage calamity...
-
My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.
-
The only sensible person is my tailor. He measures me anew each time he sees me.
-
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!
-
I am a sort of collector of religions: and the curious thing is that I find I can believe in them all.
-
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
-
It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
-
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.
-
All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.