George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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The theory that music has a depraving effect on morals has now been abandoned to the old women of both sexes.
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The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
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We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.
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The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.
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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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What we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.
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Religion is a good invention in times of stress.
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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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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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What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
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When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while to keep them.
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If you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have.
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A vegetarian is not a person who lives on vegetables, any more than a Catholic is a person who lives on cats.
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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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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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An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
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Style is effectiveness of assertion.
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Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.
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The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.
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Some people look at the world and say 'why?' Some people look at the world and say 'why not?'
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The only way in which a nation can make itself wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping: that is, by providing for its wants in the order of their importance, and allowing no money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until necessities have been thoroughly served.
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Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.
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That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.
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You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day's wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you.