George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Man is unique in that he has plans, purpose and goals which require the need for criteria of choice. The need for ethical value is within man whose future may largely be determined by the choice he make...
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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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Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.
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Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
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I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that.
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Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.
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I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it.
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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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The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.
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There is the eternal war between those who are in the world for what they can get out of it and those who are in the world to make it a better place for everybody to live in.
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I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.
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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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I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.
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Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
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Communism, being the lay form of Catholicism, and indeed meaning the same thing, has never had any lack of chaplains.
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Be like the sun and meadow, which are not in the least concerned about the coming winter.
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You sometimes have to answer a woman according to her womanliness, just as you have to answer a fool according to his folly.
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Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
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Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice...
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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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Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.
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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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Medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common cure-mongering witchcraft...
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Fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.