George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Seemingly unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. Much progress, therefore, depends on such people.
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Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
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Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.
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The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.
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As long as more people will pay admission to a theater to see a naked body than to see a naked brain, the drama will languish.
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Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
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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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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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Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders.
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I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everybody there looks an original. All other nations are obviously mass produced.
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In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
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A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.
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The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.
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I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation.
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There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.
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If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.
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The Anti-Vivisector does not deny that physiologists must make experiments and even take chances with new methods. He says that they must not seek knowledge by criminal methods, just as they must not make money by criminal methods. He does not object to Galileo dropping cannon balls from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa; but he would object to shoving off two dogs or American tourists.
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The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
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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 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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Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks.
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Men trifle with their business and their politics but never trifle with their games. It brings truth home to them. They cannot pretend they have won when they have lost nor that they had a magnificent drive when they foozled it. The Englishman is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.
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I don't. I look my age; and I am my age. It is the other people who look older than they are. What can you expect from people who eat corpses and drink spirits?
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When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.