George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
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Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character.
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Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.
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Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something.
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Our prejudices are so deeply rooted that we never think of them as prejudices but call them common sense.
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Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
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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 notion that disarmament can put a stop to war is contradicted by the nearest dogfight.
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Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
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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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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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Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries.
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Democracy is a word all public men use and none understand.
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What use are cartridges in battle? I always carry chocolate instead.
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Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.
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Nobody can live in society without conventions. The reason why sensible people are as conventional as they can bear to be is that conventionality saves so much time and thought and trouble and social friction of one sort or another that it leaves them much more leisure time for freedom than unconventionality does.
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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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I do not know what I think until I write it.
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Keep away from books and from men who get their ideas from books, and your own books will always be fresh.
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The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
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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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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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Virtue is insufficient temptation.
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Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say 'No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.