George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage.
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Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.
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Never repeat old grievances.
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War does not decide who is right but who is left.
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Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.
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In my dreams is a country where the State is the Church and the Church the people: three in one and one in three. It is a commonwealth in which work is play and play is life: three in one and one in three. It is a temple in which the priest is the worshiper and the worshiper the worshipped: three in one and one in three. It is a godhead in which all life is human and all humanity divine: three in one and one in three.
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I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.
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The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.
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We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?
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Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.
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If there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It's in the nature of governments to tell lies.
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I wish people would stop talking about my birthday.
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I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On.
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It is most unwise for people in love to marry.
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Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.
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The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
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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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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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I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going.
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Greatness is one of the sensations of littleness...
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An interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personalimportance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed.
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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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Our first duty, to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.