George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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She is immensely interested in him. She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man.
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The policy of letting things alone, in the practical sense that the Government should never interfere with business or go into business itself, is called Laisser-faire by economists and politicians. It has broken down so completely in practice that it is now discredited; but it was all the fashion in politics a hundred years ago, and is still influentially advocated by men of business and their backers who naturally would like to be allowed to make money as they please without regard to the interest of the public.
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I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.
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I have not wasted my life trifling with literary fools in taverns, as Johnson did, when he should have been shaking England with the thunder of his spirit...
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Life is too short for men to take it seriously.
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As to spelling the very frequent word though with six letters instead of two, it is impossible to discuss it, as it is outside the range of common sanity. In comparison such a monstrosity as phlegm for flem is merely disgusting.
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You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.
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Blasphemy and sedition meaning the truth about Church and State.
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Go on writing plays, my boy, One of these days one of these London producers will go into his office and say to his secretary, "Is there a play from Shaw this morning?" and when she says, "No," he will say, "Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish." And that's your chance, my boy.
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No sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus.
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Any belief worth having must survive doubt...
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Reviewing has one advantage over suicide: in suicide you take it out on yourself; in reviewing you take it out on other people.
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It is not that I am so clever; it is that everyone else is so stupid.
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But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things.
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With the exception of capitalism, there is nothing so revolting as revolution.
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To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.
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I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical.
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The man who has never made a mistake will never make anything else.
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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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Oh, well, if you want original conversations, you'd better go and talk to yourself.
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We are sick of war, we don't want to fight, And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead.
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The practical question, then, is what to do with the children. Tolerate them at home we will not. Let them run loose in the streets we dare not until our streets become safe places for children, which, to our utter shame, they are not at present, though they can hardly be worse than some homes and some schools.
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Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.
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The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.