George Bernard Shaw Quotes
-
It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
-
The stock actor is a stage calamity...
-
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.
-
Every Englishman believes that Handel now occupies an important position in heaven. If so, le bon Dieu must feel toward him very much as Louis Treize felt toward Richelieu.
-
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
-
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
-
All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.
-
Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.
-
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.
-
We mustn't be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.
-
When the horrors of anarchy force us to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts content.
-
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.
-
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!
-
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
-
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
-
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.
-
Nowadays a parlor maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective.
-
Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final.
-
There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
-
Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
-
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.
-
My only policy is to profess evil and do good.
-
We are not taught to think decently on sex subjects, and consequently we have no language for them except indecent language.
-
Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.