George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.
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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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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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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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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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In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every private employer a dictator, every financier a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at his mercy, and no public responsibility.
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You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
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People get tired of everything, and of nothing sooner than of what they most like.
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Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
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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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The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.
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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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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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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.
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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 first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
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German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen.
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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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In a hospital they throw you out into the street before you are half cured, but in a nursing home they don't let you out till you are dead.
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Discussing vaccination with a doctor is like discussing vegetarianism with a butcher.
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Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo!!! I ain't dirty: I washed me face and hands afore I come, I did!
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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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No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.