George Bernard Shaw Quotes
-
Morals are a luxury of the rich.
-
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
-
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.
-
The only person who acts sensibly is my tailor. He takes my measure anew every time he sees me. Everyone else goes by their old measurements.
-
It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.
-
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.
-
I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.
-
Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
-
I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation.
-
To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching.
-
I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot.
-
Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor: not even a poor employer or a poor landlord.
-
Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
-
Rebecca West can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely.
-
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.
-
The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.
-
Seemingly unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. Much progress, therefore, depends on such people.
-
One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
-
Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.
-
Englishmen never will be slaves; they are free to do whatever the government and public opinion allow them.
-
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.