George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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God is on the side of the big battalions.
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Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population.
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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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The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
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It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something.
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Englishmen never will be slaves; they are free to do whatever the government and public opinion allow them.
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Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men.
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Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
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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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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.
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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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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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Seemingly unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. Much progress, therefore, depends on such people.
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Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.
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Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.
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Deep knowledge is not knowledge of the thing itself, but knowledge of a thing like the thing. Then, you gain not one knowledge, but two knowledges. Of the thing. And of the original thing with is like the thing. Which is the barbarism of the privileged class.
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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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A married man is a man with a past, while a bachelor is a man with a future.
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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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It was from Handel that I learned that style consists in force of assertion.
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Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby...
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Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols or bombs without incurring any penalties.