George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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It is the first duty of every man not to be poor.
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The cinema is going to form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct, will be those of the film.
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Some persons, by hating vice too much, come to love men too little. Hatred is self-punishment. Hatred is the cowards revenge for being intimidated.
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What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
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First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
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If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative litt...
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I prefer the man who calls his nonsense a mystery to him who who pretends it is a weighed, measured, analyzed fact.
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Paradoxes are the only truths.
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Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
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All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality conquers them.
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A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people's time to look after them.
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The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it ... If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?
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I'm one of the undeserving poor: that's what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he's up agen middle class morality all the time.... What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything.
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Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like. See?
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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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A man of genius is not a man who sees more than other men do. On the contrary, it is very often found that he is absentminded andobserves much less than other people.... Why is it that the public have such an exaggerated respect for him--after he is dead? The reason is that the man of genius understands the importance of the few things he sees.
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Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.
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Whenever an obviously well founded statement is made in England by a person specially well acquainted with the facts, that unlucky person is instantly and frantically contradicted by all the people who obviously know nothing about it.
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Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.
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A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for 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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What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.
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The ability to make witty observations is commonly refered to as "cynism" by people who lack it.