George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.

George Bernard Shaw
Sir Patrick: Lord! Yes. Modern science is a wonderful thing. Look at your great discovery! Look at all the great discoveries! Where are they leading to? Why, right back to my poor dear old father's ideas and discoveries. He's been dead now over forth years. Oh, it's very interesting. Ridgeton: Well, there's nothing like progress, is there?

George Bernard Shaw
[...] any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.

George Bernard Shaw
My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I'm a free citizen.

George Bernard Shaw
It is one of the mysterious ways of Allah to make women troublesome when he makes them beautiful.

George Bernard Shaw
There is nothing like biology. "The cloud-capped towers, the solemn binnacles, the gorgeous temples, the great globe itself: yea, all that it inherit shall dissolve, and, like this influential parent faded, leave not a rack behind." That's biology, you know. Good sound biology.

George Bernard Shaw
Mind you, that you have a sound scientific theory to correlate your observations at the bedside. Mere experience by itself is nothing. If I take my dog to the bedside with me, he sees what I see. But he learns nothing from it. Why? Because he's not a scientific dog.

George Bernard Shaw
DON JUAN: Stupidity has all the knowledge, and Imagination all the intelligence.

George Bernard Shaw
He said that private practice in medicine ought to be put down by law. When I asked him why, he said that private doctors were ignorant licensed murders.

George Bernard Shaw
Why the men who believe in electrons should regard themselves as less credulous than the men who believed in angels is not apparent to me.

George Bernard Shaw
The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.

George Bernard Shaw
When a bishop at the first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock round the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically... but that does not justify him in pretending...that Christ is, in effect, Mars.

George Bernard Shaw
The practical question, then, is what to do with the children. Tolerate them at home we will not. Let them run loose in the streets we dare not until our streets become safe places for children, which, to our utter shame, they are not at present, though they can hardly be worse than some homes and some schools.

George Bernard Shaw
You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.

George Bernard Shaw
The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind,
the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.

George Bernard Shaw
Whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit he was a first-rate political economist.

George Bernard Shaw
To make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy. To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy.

George Bernard Shaw
Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist.

George Bernard Shaw
Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma.

George Bernard Shaw
Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.

George Bernard Shaw
The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

George Bernard Shaw
The sex illusion is not a fixed quantity: not what mathematicians call a constant. It varies from zero in my wife's case to madness in that of our stepsister.

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

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

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