George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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A dinner! How horrible! I am to be made the pretext for killing all those wretched animals and birds, and fish! Thank you for nothing. Now if it were to be a fast instead of a feast; say a solemn three days' abstention from corpses in my honour, I could at least pretend to believe that it was disinterested. Blood sacrifices are not in my line...
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While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
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Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
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I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?
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I know I began as a passion and have ended as a habit, like all husbands.
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Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something.
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Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.
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We call the one side [of humanity] religion, and we call the other science. Religion is always right. ... Science is always wrong; it is the very artifice of men. Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.
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It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.
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If a woman rebels against high-heeled shoes, she should take care to do it in a very smart hat...
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Lack of money is the root of all evil.
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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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Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.
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Nowadays a parlor maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective.
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Everyone can see that the people who hunt are the right people and the people who don't are the wrong ones.
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I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow's feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong.
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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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All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.
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Don't ask me for promises until I know what I am promising.
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You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell: All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.
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The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
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General consultant to mankind.