George Bernard Shaw Quotes

“Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.”

“Better never than late.”

“The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.”

“Financiers live in a world of illusion. They count on something which they call the capital of the country, which has no existence.”

“Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”

“There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.”

“Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.”

“I learned more from the first stupid woman who fell in love with me than ever my brains taught me.”

“Words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap”

“A learned man is an idler who kills time by study.”

“Most married couples spend the whole day apart, the woman in the house, the man in the office or study or workshop.”

“You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.”

“Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment.”

“The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.”

“All great art and literature is propaganda.”

“When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.”

“To disbelieve in marriage is easy: to love a married woman is easy; but to betray a comrade, to be disloyal to a host, to break the covenant of bread and salt, is impossible.”

“We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.”

“What's the use of money if you have to earn it.”

“What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.”

“What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?”

“Men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.”

“Those who can’t change their minds can’t change anything.”

“If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.”

“Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.”