George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Christmas is forced upon a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred.
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Indifference is the essence of inhumanity.
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Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols or bombs without incurring any penalties.
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Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.
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I don't like the idea of killing my fellow creatures in order to eat their dead bodies.
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Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.
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In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as 1 percent of us could give physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.
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Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries.
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A serious illness or a death advertises the doctor exactly as a hanging advertises the barrister who defended the person hanged.
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In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.
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It is very doubtful whether man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious and efficient constitution. All the evidence is against it.
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The open mind never acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions.
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Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty.
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In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win.
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A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.
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At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox.
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Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.
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We educate one another; and we cannot do this if half of us consider the other half not good enough to talk to.
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If only for a half hour a day, a child should do something serviceable to the community...
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Hollywood keeps before its child audiences a string of glorified young heroes, everyone of whom is an unhesitating and violent Anarchist. His one answer to everything that annoys him or disparages his country or his parents or his young lady or his personal code of manly conduct is to give the offender a "sock" in the jaw.... My observation leads me to believe that it is not the virtuous people who are good at socking jaws.
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What is the matter with universities is that the students are school children, whereas it is of the very essence of university education that they should be adults.
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You do not settle whether an argument is justified by merely showing that it is of some use. The distinction is not between useful and useless experiments but between barbarous and civilized behaviour.
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A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
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Stop being Jews and start being human beings.