George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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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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You in America should trust to that volcanic political instinct which I have divined in you.
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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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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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A man's behaviour may be quite harmless and even beneficial, when he ismorally behaving like a scoundrel. And he may do great harm when he is morally acting on the highest principles.
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When your eyes are fixed in the stare of unconsciousness, and your throat coughs the last gasping breath - as one dragged in the dark to a great precipice - what assistance are a wife and child?
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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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What is both surprising and delightful is that the spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game...There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability.
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Life is a first draft... with NO rewrite.
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Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
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Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
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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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All autobiographies are lies. I do not mean unconscious, unintentional lies: I mean deliberate lies.
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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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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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Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
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A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.
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English is the easiest language to speak badly.
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If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
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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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Beware of the man whose God is in the skies.
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I do not want to make my stomach a graveyard of dead animals.
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If you don't begin to be a revolutionist at the age of twenty, then at fifty you will be a most impossible old fossil. If you area red revolutionary at the age of twenty, you have some chance of being up-to-date when you are forty!
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To the person with a toothache, even if the world is tottering, there is nothing more important than a visit to a dentist.