George Bernard Shaw

Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.

— George Bernard Shaw

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.

— George Bernard Shaw

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

— George Bernard Shaw

I'm not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead -- ahead of myself as well as you.

— George Bernard Shaw

If you value a man's regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper -- and despise it.

— George Bernard Shaw

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

— George Bernard Shaw

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

— George Bernard Shaw

I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.

— George Bernard Shaw

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

— George Bernard Shaw

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

— George Bernard Shaw

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

— George Bernard Shaw

In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

— George Bernard Shaw

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.

— George Bernard Shaw

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.

— George Bernard Shaw

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

— George Bernard Shaw

In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.

— George Bernard Shaw

Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple. Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don't know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond.

— George Bernard Shaw

You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.

— George Bernard Shaw

How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

— George Bernard Shaw

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.

— George Bernard Shaw

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

— George Bernard Shaw

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

— George Bernard Shaw

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.

— George Bernard Shaw

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?

— George Bernard Shaw

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

— George Bernard Shaw

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.

— George Bernard Shaw

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

— George Bernard Shaw

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.

— George Bernard Shaw

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.

— George Bernard Shaw

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

— George Bernard Shaw

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.

— George Bernard Shaw

She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

— George Bernard Shaw

The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.

— George Bernard Shaw

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

— George Bernard Shaw

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

— George Bernard Shaw

Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.

— George Bernard Shaw

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

— George Bernard Shaw

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

— George Bernard Shaw

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.

— George Bernard Shaw

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

[Dancing is] A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

— George Bernard Shaw

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

— George Bernard Shaw

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.

— George Bernard Shaw

I want to be all used up when I die.

— George Bernard Shaw

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

— George Bernard Shaw

The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

— George Bernard Shaw

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

— George Bernard Shaw

I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That's right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That's democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.

— George Bernard Shaw

Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.

— George Bernard Shaw

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

— George Bernard Shaw

The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

— George Bernard Shaw

Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.

— George Bernard Shaw

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

— George Bernard Shaw

If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.

— George Bernard Shaw

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

— George Bernard Shaw

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

— George Bernard Shaw

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.

— George Bernard Shaw

Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.

— George Bernard Shaw

I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.

— George Bernard Shaw

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

— George Bernard Shaw

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example.

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

— George Bernard Shaw

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

— George Bernard Shaw

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.

— George Bernard Shaw

We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.

— George Bernard Shaw

He didn't dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life.

— George Bernard Shaw

When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.

— George Bernard Shaw

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

— George Bernard Shaw

My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately

— George Bernard Shaw

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

— George Bernard Shaw

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

— George Bernard Shaw

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

— George Bernard Shaw

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

— George Bernard Shaw

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

— George Bernard Shaw

The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.

— George Bernard Shaw

But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich, something for nothing.

— George Bernard Shaw

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

— George Bernard Shaw

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

— George Bernard Shaw

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

— George Bernard Shaw

To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God's hand, his brain as God's brain, his purpose as God's purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.

— George Bernard Shaw

Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.

— George Bernard Shaw

You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

— George Bernard Shaw

Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.

— George Bernard Shaw

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

— George Bernard Shaw

A lifetime of happiness? No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.

— George Bernard Shaw

Give a man health and a course to steer; and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

— George Bernard Shaw

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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.

— George Bernard Shaw

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

— George Bernard Shaw