George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
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An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.
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Never believe anything a writer tells you about himself. A man comes to believe in the end the lies he tells himself about himself.
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Imitation is not just the sincerest form of flattery - it's the sincerest form of learning.
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The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.
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Discussing vaccination with a doctor is like discussing vegetarianism with a butcher.
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We all have--to put it as nicely as I can--our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with terriblepower that sometimes destroys us; but they don't talk.... Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before--truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.
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You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.
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The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
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No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
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We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
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Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
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People get tired of everything, and of nothing sooner than of what they most like.
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German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen.
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Set me anything to do as a task, and it is inconceivable the desire I have to do something else.
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I never expect a soldier to think.
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We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them.
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Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or religion.
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Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
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The salvation of the world depends on the men who will not take evil good-humouredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him.
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The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff indicating her body, this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.
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My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
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The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
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It is easy - terribly easy - to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.