George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.

George Bernard Shaw
There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage.

George Bernard Shaw
Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.

George Bernard Shaw
But for this very reason no doctor dare accuse another of malpractice. He is not sure enough of his own opinion to ruin another man by it.

George Bernard Shaw
Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it.

George Bernard Shaw
Blasphemy and sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State).

George Bernard Shaw
The poor silly-clever Irishman takes off his hat to God's Englishman.

George Bernard Shaw
If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.

George Bernard Shaw
When a lion meets another with a louder roar, the first lion thinks the last a bore.

George Bernard Shaw
Not love: we know better than that. Let's call it chemistry... Well, you're attracting me irresistibly — chemically.

George Bernard Shaw
Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.

George Bernard Shaw
All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins?

George Bernard Shaw
Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie: no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

George Bernard Shaw
Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors.

George Bernard Shaw
To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.

George Bernard Shaw
There are two things necessary to Salvation.... Money and gunpowder.

George Bernard Shaw
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.

George Bernard Shaw
A sensitive boy's humiliations may be very good fun for ordinary thick-skinned grown-ups; but to the boy himself theyareso acute, so ignominious, that he cannot confess themcannot but deny them passionately.

George Bernard Shaw
It is not the number of years we have behind us, but the number we have before us, that makes us careful and responsible and determined to find out the truth about everything.

George Bernard Shaw
Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.

George Bernard Shaw
If pity is akin to love, gratitude is akin to the other thing.

George Bernard Shaw
Affection between adults - if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown up children - and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural.

George Bernard Shaw
Most married couples spend the whole day apart, the woman in the house, the man in the office or study or workshop.

George Bernard Shaw
All problems are finally scientific problems.

George Bernard Shaw
When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell's major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.

George Bernard Shaw