George Bernard Shaw Quotes

“Very few people can afford to be poor.”

“If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.”

“With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”

“I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow's feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong.”

“We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.”

“The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.”

“What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.”

“No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.”

“People who are hard, grasping and always ready to take advantage of their neighbors become very rich.”

“I fought linotype and montype for some time because it would not justify as well as handset could be made to do; but at last, as always happens, the machine outdid the hand, and got all the best types on it.”

“I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.”

“I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.”

“Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.”

“Trade unionism is not socialism. It is the capitalism of the proletariat.”

“Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.”

“Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.”

“When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.”

“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.”

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”

“Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good.”

“The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.”

“If all you are going to do in life are the things that are convenient and comfortable, the great things never get done.”

“We should have had socialism already, but for the socialists, am quite willing to drop the name if dropping it will help me to get the thing.”

“People exaggerate the value of things they haven't got everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with them”

“Revolutionary moments attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.”