George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.
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There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.
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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 do not waste my time writing pot-boilers: the pot must be boiled, and even my pot au feu has some chunks of fresh meat in it. ...I have no time to boil myself down; and anyhow I could not do so and preserve all the necessary nutriment and the flavoring on which the digestibility depends.
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Never repeat old grievances.
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My mother married a very good man ... and she is not at all keen on my doing the same.
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People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.
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We are compelled by the theory of God's already achieved perfection to make Him a devil as well as a god, because of the existenceof evil. The god of love, if omnipotent and omniscient, must be the god of cancer and epilepsy as well.... Whoever admits that anything living is evil must either believe that God is malignantly capable of creating evil, or else believe that God has made many mistakes in His attempts to make a perfect being.
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Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.
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Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
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Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
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God made the world as an artist and that is why the world must learn from its artists.
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Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple. Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don't know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond.
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If more than 10% of the people like a painting, you can be sure it's bad.
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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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A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.
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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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Social questions are too sectional, too topical, too temporal to move a man to the mighty effort which is needed to produce greatpoetry. Prison reform may nerve Charles Reade to produce an effective and businesslike prose melodrama; but it could never produce Hamlet, Faust, or Peer Gynt.
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Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
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There are two things necessary to Salvation.... Money and gunpowder.
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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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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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Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.
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Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.