George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.
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I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough.
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When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.
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Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.
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Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.
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Idiots are always in favour of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favour of equality.
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Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.
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They tell me that So-and-So, who does not write prefaces, is no charlatan. Well, I am. I first caught the ear of the British public on a cart in Hyde Park, to the blaring of brass bands,and this . . . because . . . I am a natural-born mountebank.
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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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The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.
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The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.
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It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
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There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.
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It is feeling that sets a man thinking, and not thought that sets him feeling.
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Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.
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Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst.
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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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Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.
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The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
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We are not taught to think decently on sex subjects, and consequently we have no language for them except indecent language.
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Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.
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It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles.
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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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Virtue is insufficient temptation.