George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure.
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Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it...
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Your father is a fool skin deep; but you are a fool to your very marrow.
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We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry of our hearts.
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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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The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.
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My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
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The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
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Well, I tell you again to get rid of your Constitution. But I suppose you won't do it. You have a good president and you have a bad Constitution, and the bad Constitution gets the better of the good President all the time. The end of it will be is that you might as well have an English Prime Minister.
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A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
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When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.
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I believe in the discipline of silence, and could talk for hours about it.
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The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud.
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If any religion had a chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.
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Life is a first draft... with NO rewrite.
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Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
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I myself have been particularly careful never to say a civil word to the United States. I have scoffed at their inhabitants as a nation of villagers. I have defined the 100 % American as 99 % an idiot. And they adore me.
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I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
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The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.
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It is monstrous that custom should force us to display our faces ostentatiously, however worn and wrinkled and mean they may be, whilst carefully concealing all our other parts, however shapely and well preserved.
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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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We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
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Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family.
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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.