George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
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The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
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Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.
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The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
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I have my own soul. My own spark of divine fire.
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Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
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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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Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.
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Wicked people means people who have no love: therefore, they have no shame. They have the power to ask love because the don't need it: they have the power to offer it because they have none to give.
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If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.
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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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The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.
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I claim to be a conscientiously immoral writer.
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All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.
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I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation.
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A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.
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Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance.
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The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.
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Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby...
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I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. . . . I tell you, gentlemen, if you can shew a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally.
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The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.
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But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.
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Even to this day it is easier than it ought to be for me to get a rise out of an American by telling him something about himself which is equally true about every human being on the face of the globe. He at once resents this as a disparagement and an assertion on my part that people in other parts of the globe are not like that, and are loftily superior to such weaknesses.
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Laws, religions, creeds, and systems of ethics, instead of making society better than its best unit, make it worse than its average unit, because they are never up to date.