George Bernard Shaw Quotes

“Oh, come! That boot is on the other leg. Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that”

“A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.”

“You don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you? . . . If it's by a good author, it's a good play, naturally. That stands to reason.”

“A third variety of drama ... begins as tragedy with scraps of fun in it ... and ends in comedy without mirth in it, the place of mirth being taken by a more or less bitter and critical irony.”

“Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.”

“It is very doubtful whether man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious and efficient constitution. All the evidence is against it.”

“Principles without programs are platitudes.”

“Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.”

“He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.”

“Paradoxes are the only truths.”

“I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.”

“Two people getting together to write a book is like three people getting together to have a baby. One of them is superfluous.”

“My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.”

“We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time; or we shall stick in the mud.”

“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.”

“My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.”

“Life is a first draft... with NO rewrite.”

“Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst.”

“A fool-proof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble; then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant.”

“All problems are finally scientific problems.”

“I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation.”

“The Englishmen is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.”

“Democracy is a word all public men use and none understand.”

“No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.”

“Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist.”