George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.
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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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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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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.
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I claim to be a conscientiously immoral writer.
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Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.
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Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.
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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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If you teach a man anything, he will never learn.
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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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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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Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
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Indifference is the essence of inhumanity.
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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.
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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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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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Well, upon my soul! You are not ashamed to stand there and confess yourself a disgusting drunkard.
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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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Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance.
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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.
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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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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.