George Bernard Shaw Quotes

“It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”

“Youth is wasted on the young.”

“A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.”

“Bourgeois morality is largely a system of making cheap virtues a cloak for expensive vices.”

“The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.”

“Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.”

“We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!”

“Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.”

“Who are those we love? Only those we do not hate.”

“Only fools repeat the same things over and over, expecting to obtain different results.”

“One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.”

“In an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.”

“Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.”

“I don't like the idea of killing my fellow creatures in order to eat their dead bodies.”

“My way of joking is to tell the truth”

“Go anywhere in England where there are natural wholesome, contented and really nice English people; and what do you find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.”

“It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.”

“Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing -a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.”

“A cigarette is a pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool at the other.”

“When commenting on the turmoil and disorder of the world, If the other planets are inhabited, they must be using this earth as their insane asylum.”

“Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.”

“What a heartbreaking job it is trying to combine authors for their own protection... the first lesson I learned was that when you take the field for the authors you will be safer without a breastplate than without a backplate.”

“An index is a great leveller.”

“You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.”

“I no longer desire happiness: life is nobler than that.”