George Bernard Shaw Quotes
-
Write your Sad times in Sand, Write your Good times in Stone.
-
No child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor.
-
I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.
-
There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles; he bullies you on manly principles; he supports his king on loyal principles and cuts off his king's head on republican principles.
-
I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.
-
The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.
-
Life is a flame that is always burning itself out; but it catches fire again every time a child is born. Life is greater than death, and hope than despair.
-
Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.
-
It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.
-
The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.
-
Even a vortex is a vortex in something. You can't have a whirlpool without water; and you can't have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.
-
Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
-
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
-
The Italians must allow us to slaughter the Momands, because, if we do not kill the warlike hillmen, they will kill us. And we must allow the Italians to slaughter the Danakils for the same reason.
-
Democracy means the organization of society for the benefit and at the expense of everybody indiscriminately and not for the benefit of a privileged class.
-
You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
-
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.
-
When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder column.
-
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.
-
'He must be greatly changed. Has he attained the seventh degree of concentration?'
-
Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.
-
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
-
Tradition will accustom people to any atrocity...
-
All great art and literature is propaganda.