George Bernard Shaw Quotes

The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law. Virtually there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for the cunning and another for the simple, one law for the forceful and another for the feeble, one law for the ignorant and another for the learned, one law for the brave and another for the timid, and within family limits one law for the parent and no law at all for the child.

All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake. Not that it's wrong to try to improve the world if you know how but simply because struggling and striving are the worst possible ways to go about doing anything!

Spend all you have before you die, and do not outlive yourself.

I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, ininvention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.

The ideal love affair should be conducted by post.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment.

Some people look at the world and say 'why?' Some people look at the world and say 'why not?'

The chief objection to playing wind instruments is that it prolongs the life of the player.

We are all victims of the violence that animals suffer... their liberation is also our liberation.

You are my inspiration and my folly. You are my light across the sea, my million nameless joys, and my day's wage. You are my divinity, my madness, my selfishness, my transfiguration and purification. You are my rapscallionly fellow vagabond, my tempter and star. I want you.

My mother married a very good man ... and she is not at all keen on my doing the same.

No age or condition is without its heroes . The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon , the least confused thinker its Socrates , the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare .

You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could.

Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.

Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.

The price of ability does not depend on merit but on supply and demand.

Shall I turn up the light for you? No, give me deeper darkness. Money is not made in the light.

It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

I don't know what to say about this book. The experience on which it is founded is so extraordinary, that an honest record of it should be preserved . . . But it would have driven me mad; and I am not sure that the author came out of it without a slight derangement.

All industries are brought under the control of such people [film producers] by Capitalism. If the capitalists let themselves be seduced from their pursuit of profits to the enchantments of art, they would be bankrupt before they knew where they were. You cannot combine the pursuit of money with the pursuit of art.

The average age (longevity) of a meat eater is 63. I am on the verge of 85 and still work as hard as ever. I have lived quite long enough and am trying to die; but I simply cannot do it. A single beef-steak would finish me; but I cannot bring myself to swallow it. I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.

The 100% American is 99% idiot.

All sorts of bodily diseases are produced by half-used minds.

Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?

It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.

We are sick of war, we don't want to fight, And yet we gorge ourselves upon the dead.

Changeable women are more endurable that monotonous ones; they are sometimes murdered but never deserted.

It is the first duty of every man not to be poor.

Rebecca [West] can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely.

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.

I love little children too but I don't cut off their heads and stick them in vases.

The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.

I am oppressed with a dread of living forever. That is the only disadvantage of vegetarianism.

I ... must continue to strive for more knowledge and more power, though the new knowledge always contradicts the old and the new power is the destruction of the fools who misuse it.

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.

There is only one universal passion fear.

Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent them disturbing and chaperoning their parent.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active. That is why it is necessary to happiness that one should be tired.

[Man] progresses in all things by making a fool of himself.

When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age, ask them how they would like to life in a stationary one, and do without change

Not until he acquires European manners does the American anarchist become the gentleman who assures you that people cannot be mademoral by Act of Parliament (the truth being that it is only by Acts of Parliament that men in large communities can be made moral, even when they want to).

Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

What use are cartridges in battle? I always carry chocolate instead.

War does not decide who is right but who is left.

Altogether too many sheep

In truth , mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true : what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him.

Deep knowledge is not knowledge of the thing itself, but knowledge of a thing like the thing. Then, you gain not one knowledge, but two knowledges. Of the thing. And of the original thing with is like the thing. Which is the barbarism of the privileged class.

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

The mathematician is fascinated with the marvelous beauty of the forms he constructs, and in their beauty he finds everlasting truth.

I want to be all used up when I die.

Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.

It is nearly 50 years since I was assured by a conclave of doctors that if I did not eat meat I should die of starvation.

An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country.

Money enables us to get what we want instead of what other people think we want.

The longer I live, the more I realize that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time!

There is a terrible truthfulness about photography that sometimes makes a thing look ridiculous.