George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
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Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.
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Unbounded hopes were placed on each successive extension of the electoral franchise, culminating in the enfranchisement of women.These hopes have been disappointed, because the voters, male and female, being politically untrained and uneducated, have (a) no grasp of constructive measures; (b) loathe taxation as such; (c) dislike being governed at all; and (d) dread and resent any extension of official interference as an encroachment on their personal liberty.
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A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
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Seemingly unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. Much progress, therefore, depends on such people.
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The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.
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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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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.
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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 do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it. ...I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends.
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You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.
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Democracy is a word all public men use and none understand.
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There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes.
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The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
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The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.
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Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.
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Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
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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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Patriotism is a word which always commemorates a robbery.
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Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
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In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
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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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Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanginary execution after torture, for its central mystery is an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of equality and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance.
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Women have been a ghastly nuisance in my life.