George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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The righteous man takes his life in his hand whenever he utters the truth.
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Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
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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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Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.
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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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People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
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Ladies and gentlemen are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.
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Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
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All industries are brought under the control of such people [film producers] by Capitalism. If the capitalists let themselves be seduced from their pursuit of profits to the enchantments of art, they would be bankrupt before they knew where they were. You cannot combine the pursuit of money with the pursuit of art.
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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.
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I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that.
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It’s not about the budget; it’s about the power...So will the attack on unions succeed? I don’t know. But anyone who cares about retaining government of the people by the people should hope that it doesn’t.
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We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?
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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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Therefore my tax-payer, resign yourself to this: that we may fight bravely, fight hard, fight long, fight cunningly, fight recklessly, fight in a hundred and fifty ways, but we cannot fight cheaply.
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Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.
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The cinema is going to form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct, will be those of the film.
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Instead of Otello being an Italian opera written in the style of Shakespeare, Othello is a play written by Shakespeare in the style of Italian opera.
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My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God - nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?
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Always strive to find out what to do by thinking, without asking anybody. If you continually do this, you will soon act like a grown-up woman. For want of doing this, a very great number of grown-up people act like children.
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Everybody who does not live in a prostitute's bed and on a diet of cocaine snow is called an ascetic nowadays.
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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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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 truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.