George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

PATIOKIM: In Russia we face facts.
EDSTATON: In England, sir, a gentleman never faces any fact if they are unpleasant facts.
PATIOKIM: In real life, all facts are unpleasant.

George Bernard Shaw
Sexually,Woman is Nature's contrivance for perpetuating its highest achievement.

George Bernard Shaw
It is in the hour of trial that a man finds his true profession.

George Bernard Shaw
If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else.

George Bernard Shaw
When men die of disease they are said to die from
natural causes. When they recover (and mostly they do)
the doctor gets the credit of curing them.

George Bernard Shaw
The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.

George Bernard Shaw
Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries.

George Bernard Shaw
God's trustiest lieutenants often lack official credentials. They may be professed atheists who are also men of honour and high public spirit.

George Bernard Shaw
Let no one suppose that the words doctor and patient can disguise from the parties the fact that they are employer and employee.

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

George Bernard Shaw
I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.

George Bernard Shaw
Just as men imitate each other, germs imitate each other.

George Bernard Shaw
There is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her elder sister; and that is her mother.

George Bernard Shaw
The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

George Bernard Shaw
Even trained statisticians often fail to appreciate the extent to which statistics are vitiated by the unrecorded assumptions of their interpreters.

George Bernard Shaw
We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time, or we shall stick in the mud. Yet neither must we undertake a new world as catastrophic Utopians, and wreck our civilization in our hurry to mend it.

George Bernard Shaw
Just as the historian can teach no real history until he has cured his readers of the romantic delusion that the greatness of a queen consists in her being a pretty woman and having her head cut off, so the playwright of the first order can do nothing with his audience until he has cured them of looking at the stage through the keyhole, and sniffing round the theatre as prurient people sniff round the divorce court.

George Bernard Shaw
The pursuit of omnipotence and omniscience. Greater power and greater knowledge: these are what we are all pursuing even at the risk of our lives and the sacrifice of our pleasures. Evolution is that pursuit and nothing else. It is the path to godhead. A man differs from a microbe only in being further on the path.

George Bernard Shaw
Remember always that the least plain sister is the family beauty.

George Bernard Shaw
I must remind you that our credulity is not to be measured by the truth of the things we believe. When men believed that the earthwas flat, they were not credulous: they were using their common sense, and, if asked to prove that the earth was flat, would have said simply, "Look at it." Those who refuse to believe that it is round are exercising a wholesome skepticism.

George Bernard Shaw
The righteous man takes his life in his hand whenever he utters the truth.

George Bernard Shaw
RIDGEON: The buried truth germinates and breaks through to the light.

George Bernard Shaw
If you demand my authorities for this and that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority.

George Bernard Shaw
No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn't actually fall down.

George Bernard Shaw
I have no powder, no bottle, no tabloid. I am not a quack: I am a biologist.

George Bernard Shaw
You don't get tired of muffins, but you don't find inspiration in them.

George Bernard Shaw
If a man is indolent, let him be poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor.... Also--somewhat inconsistently--blessed are the poor!

George Bernard Shaw
Make me a beautiful word for doing things tomorrow; for that surely is a great and blessed invention.

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