George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.
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Men are always thinking that they are going to do something grandly wicked to their enemies; but when it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.
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God has given us a world that nothing but our own folly keeps from being a paradise.
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I had patience with them for many ages: they tried me very sorely. They did terrible things: they embraced death, and said that eternal life was a fable. I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made...
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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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When an apparent miracle happened.it proved divine mission to the credulous, and proved a contract with the devil to the skeptical.
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HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man? DOOLITTLE unabashed Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.
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When a man of normal habits is ill, everyone hastens to assure him that he is going to recover. When a vegetarian is ill (which fortunately very seldom happens), everyone assures him that he is going to die, and that they told him so, and that it serves him right. They implore him to take at least a little gravy, so as to give himself a chance of lasting out the night...
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If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.
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Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
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I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer.
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Not everybody is strong enough to endure life without an anesthetic. Drink probably averts more gross crime than it causes.
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Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.
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Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
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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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The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
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Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.
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If you lived in London, where the whole system is one of false good-fellowship, and you may know a man for twenty years without finding out that he hates you like poison, you would soon have your eyes opened. There we do unkind things in a kind way: we say bitter things in a sweet voice: we always give our friends chloroform when we tear them to pieces.
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The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
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What I say today everybody will say tomorrow, though they will not remember who put it into their heads. Indeed they will be right for I never remember who puts things into my head : it is the Zeitgeist.
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It is one of the mysterious ways of Allah to make women troublesome when he makes them beautiful.
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We're human beings we are - all of us - and that's what people are liable to forget. Human beings don't like peace and goodwill and everybody loving everybody else. However much they may think they do, they don't really because they're not made like that. Human beings love eating and drinking and loving and hating. They also like showing off, grabbing all they can, fighting for their rights and bossing anybody who'll give them half a chance.
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I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like the state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.
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I like to quote myself frequently and often, it makes me sound much more intelligent than I actually am.