George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.
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Nowadays a parlor maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective.
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Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
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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.
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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.
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Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
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Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
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You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter;but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!
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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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Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him. Even if I did not, I should pretend to; for a taste in his music is a mark of caste among musicians, and should be worn, like a tall hat, by the amateur who wishes to pass for a true Brahmin.
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The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.
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Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
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My only policy is to profess evil and do good.
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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 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.
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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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When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
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We are not taught to think decently on sex subjects, and consequently we have no language for them except indecent language.
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Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.
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Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
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We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
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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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No doubt it is easy to demostrate that property will destroy society unless society destroys it.
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Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.