George Bernard Shaw
A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.
George Bernard ShawA fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
George Bernard ShawA fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
George Bernard ShawA gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.
George Bernard ShawA government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
George Bernard ShawA happy family is but an earlier heaven.
George Bernard ShawA life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
George Bernard ShawA little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.
George Bernard ShawA man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
George Bernard ShawA man of great common sense and good taste – meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
George Bernard ShawA man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.
George Bernard ShawA perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
George Bernard ShawA veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.
George Bernard ShawAlcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
George Bernard ShawAll great truths begin as blasphemies.
George Bernard ShawAll my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
George Bernard ShawAmericans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
George Bernard ShawAn asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
George Bernard ShawAn 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 ShawAn Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
George Bernard ShawAn index is a great leveller.
George Bernard ShawAnimals are my friends… and I don't eat my friends.
George Bernard ShawAssassination is the extreme form of censorship.
George Bernard ShawBaseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
George Bernard ShawBeauty is a short-lived tyranny.
George Bernard ShawBeauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
George Bernard ShawBetter keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
George Bernard ShawBetter never than late.
George Bernard ShawBeware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard ShawBeware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
George Bernard ShawCapitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
George Bernard ShawCensorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
George Bernard ShawChoose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
George Bernard ShawClever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
George Bernard ShawCruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.
George Bernard ShawDancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
George Bernard ShawDemocracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
George Bernard ShawDemocracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard ShawDemocracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard ShawDo not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
George Bernard ShawDo not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
George Bernard ShawDo not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
George Bernard ShawEngland and America are two countries separated by the same language.
George Bernard ShawEvery man over forty is a scoundrel.
George Bernard ShawEvery person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.
George Bernard ShawEverything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
George Bernard ShawExcept during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
George Bernard ShawFashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.
George Bernard ShawFew of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.
George Bernard ShawFew people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
George Bernard ShawFind enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.
George Bernard ShawFirst love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
George Bernard ShawGeneral consultant to mankind.
George Bernard ShawGive a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.
George Bernard ShawHe knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
George Bernard ShawHe who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
George Bernard ShawHe's a man of great common sense and good taste – meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
George Bernard ShawHegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
George Bernard ShawHell is full of musical amateurs.
George Bernard ShawHome life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
George Bernard ShawHuman beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
George Bernard ShawI am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.
George Bernard ShawI am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
George Bernard ShawI dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
George Bernard ShawI enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.
George Bernard ShawI have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.
George Bernard ShawI learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
George Bernard ShawI never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
George Bernard ShawI never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
George Bernard ShawI often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
George Bernard ShawI want to be all used up when I die.
George Bernard ShawI want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.
George Bernard ShawI would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.
George Bernard ShawI'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
George Bernard ShawIf all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
George Bernard ShawIf history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
George Bernard ShawIf there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.
George Bernard ShawIf women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.
George Bernard ShawIf you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.
George Bernard ShawIf you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
George Bernard ShawIf you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.
George Bernard ShawIf you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.
George Bernard ShawIf you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.
George Bernard ShawImagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
George Bernard ShawIn 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 ShawIn heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
George Bernard ShawIn this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.
George Bernard ShawIndependence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
George Bernard ShawIt 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 ShawIt is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard ShawIt is most unwise for people in love to marry.
George Bernard ShawIt is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
George Bernard ShawIt's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.
George Bernard ShawIt's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
George Bernard ShawJust do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
George Bernard ShawKings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
George Bernard ShawLack of money is the root of all evil.
George Bernard ShawLiberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard ShawLife contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.
George Bernard ShawLife does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
George Bernard ShawLife isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
George Bernard ShawLife levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.
George Bernard ShawLove is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
George Bernard ShawMan can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.
George Bernard ShawMarriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
George Bernard ShawMarriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
George Bernard ShawMarriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
George Bernard ShawMartyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.
George Bernard ShawMen are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
George Bernard ShawMen have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.
George Bernard ShawMiracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.
George Bernard ShawMost people do not pray; they only beg.
George Bernard ShawMy reputation grows with every failure.
George Bernard ShawNever fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.
George Bernard ShawNo man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
George Bernard ShawNo man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
George Bernard ShawNo question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.
George Bernard ShawNothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.
George Bernard ShawNothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.
George Bernard ShawOh, the tiger will love you. There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
George Bernard ShawOld men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
George Bernard ShawOne man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
George Bernard ShawOnly on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
George Bernard ShawParentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.
George Bernard ShawPatriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
George Bernard ShawPeace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
George Bernard ShawPeople become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.
George Bernard ShawPeople who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.
George Bernard ShawPerhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.
George Bernard ShawPolitical necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.
George Bernard ShawPower does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
George Bernard ShawProgress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard ShawProperty is organized robbery.
George Bernard ShawReading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
George Bernard ShawScience never solves a problem without creating ten more.
George Bernard ShawSelf-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
George Bernard ShawShe had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
George Bernard ShawSilence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
George Bernard ShawSocialism is the same as Communism, only better English.
George Bernard ShawSome look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?
George Bernard ShawStatistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
George Bernard ShawSuccess does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
George Bernard ShawSyllables govern the world.
George Bernard ShawTake care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.
George Bernard ShawThe art of government is the organisation of idolatry.
George Bernard ShawThe best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
George Bernard ShawThe British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
George Bernard ShawThe 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.
George Bernard ShawThe faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
George Bernard ShawThe fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
George Bernard ShawThe first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
George Bernard ShawThe frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.
George Bernard ShawThe golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
George Bernard ShawThe great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.
George Bernard ShawThe heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.
George Bernard ShawThe liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
George Bernard ShawThe love of economy is the root of all virtue.
George Bernard ShawThe man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
George Bernard ShawThe man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
George Bernard ShawThe minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.
George Bernard ShawThe moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
George Bernard ShawThe natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
George Bernard ShawThe only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.
George Bernard ShawThe 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 ShawThe only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
George Bernard ShawThe 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 ShawThe perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.
George Bernard ShawThe possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.
George Bernard ShawThe power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
George Bernard ShawThe secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.
George Bernard ShawThe secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.
George Bernard ShawThe single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
George Bernard ShawThe test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
George Bernard ShawThe things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
George Bernard ShawThe trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
George Bernard ShawThe truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.
George Bernard ShawThe worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
George Bernard ShawThere are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
George Bernard ShawThere are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
George Bernard ShawThere is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
George Bernard ShawThere is no sincerer love than the love of food.
George Bernard ShawThere is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
George Bernard ShawThere is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.
George Bernard ShawThere is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
George Bernard ShawThose who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
George Bernard ShawUntil the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.
George Bernard ShawUse your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
George Bernard ShawVery few people can afford to be poor.
George Bernard ShawVirtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
George Bernard ShawVirtue is insufficient temptation.
George Bernard ShawWe are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
George Bernard ShawWe are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
George Bernard ShawWe are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
George Bernard ShawWe don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
George Bernard ShawWe have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
George Bernard ShawWe learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
George Bernard ShawWe must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
George Bernard ShawWe should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.
George Bernard ShawWhat a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
George Bernard ShawWhat Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?
George Bernard ShawWhat is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
George Bernard ShawWhat we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
George Bernard ShawWhen a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.
George Bernard ShawWhen a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
George Bernard ShawWhen a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
George Bernard ShawWhen I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.
George Bernard ShawWhich painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.
George Bernard ShawWhy should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
George Bernard ShawWhy, 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 ShawWithout art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard ShawYou are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
George Bernard ShawYou can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.
George Bernard ShawYou cannot be a hero without being a coward.
George Bernard ShawYou see things; and you say “Why?” But I dream things that never were; and I say “Why not?”
George Bernard ShawYou use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
George Bernard ShawYou'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
George Bernard ShawYouth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
George Bernard ShawYouth is wasted on the young.
George Bernard Shaw