George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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They have redeemed themselves from their vileness, and turned away from their sins. Best of all, they are still not satisfied: the impulse I gave them in that day when I sundered myself in twain and launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force.

George Bernard Shaw
Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.

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

George Bernard Shaw
When the horrors of anarchy force us to set up laws that forbid us to fight and torture one another for sport, we still snatch at every excuse for declaring individuals outside the protection of law and torturing them to our hearts content.

George Bernard Shaw
A tranquil woman can go on sewing longer than an angry man can go on fuming.

George Bernard Shaw
Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.

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

George Bernard Shaw
I have to live for others and not for myself; that's middle-class morality.

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
I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly tell our children that honesty is the best policy.

George Bernard Shaw
It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.

George Bernard Shaw
The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.

George Bernard Shaw
Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make … lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.

George Bernard Shaw
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.

George Bernard Shaw
There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates, who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.

George Bernard Shaw
A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.

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
The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.

George Bernard Shaw
The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

George Bernard Shaw
There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

George Bernard Shaw
Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw
[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.

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
The one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man.

George Bernard Shaw
You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

George Bernard Shaw
That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her.

George Bernard Shaw
The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

George Bernard Shaw
It is greatly to Mrs Patrick Campbell's credit that, bad as the play was, her acting was worse.
Review of Sardou Fedora 1 June 1895

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
We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

George Bernard Shaw