George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

Undershaft: You have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn't fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it wont scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year.

George Bernard Shaw
The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.

George Bernard Shaw
Fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.

George Bernard Shaw
Use 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 Shaw
There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.

George Bernard Shaw
Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.

George Bernard Shaw
Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst.

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
Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.

George Bernard Shaw
O Lord! I don't know which is the worst of the country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do.

George Bernard Shaw
The question of who are the best people to take charge of children is a very difficult one; but it is quite certain that the parents are the very worst.

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

George Bernard Shaw
Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders.

George Bernard Shaw
The weakness of the man who, when his theory works out into a flagrant contradiction of the facts, concludes "so much the worse for the facts: let them be altered," instead of "so much the worse for my theory."

George Bernard Shaw
A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

George Bernard Shaw
People will have their miracles, their stories, their heroes and heroines and saints and martyrs and divinities to exercise their gifts of affection, admiration, wonder, and worship, and their Judases and devils to enable them to be angry and yet feel that they do well to be angry. Every one of these legends is the common heritage of the human race; and there is only one inexorable condition attached to their healthy enjoyment, which is that no one shall believe them literally. The reading of stories and delighting in them made Don Quixote a gentleman: the believing them literally made him a madman who slew lambs instead of feeding them.

George Bernard Shaw
The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

George Bernard Shaw
In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.

George Bernard Shaw
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

George Bernard Shaw
No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

George Bernard Shaw
People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.

George Bernard Shaw
Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

George Bernard Shaw
The nauseous sham goodfellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.

George Bernard Shaw
That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them.

George Bernard Shaw