George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.

George Bernard Shaw
Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous.

George Bernard Shaw
A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.

George Bernard Shaw
If I refuse to allow my leg to be amputated, its mortification and my death may prove that I was wrong; but if I let the leg go, nobody can ever prove that it would not have mortified had I been obstinate. Operation is therefore the safe side for the surgeon as well as the lucrative side.

George Bernard Shaw
Every drunken skipper trusts to Providence. But one of the ways of Providence with drunken skippers is to run them on the rocks.

George Bernard Shaw
All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality conquers them.

George Bernard Shaw
The orbit of the electron observes no law: it chooses one path and rejects another: it is as capricious as the planet Mercury, who wanders from his road to warm his hands at the sun. All is caprice: the calculable world has become incalculable.

George Bernard Shaw
It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.

George Bernard Shaw
Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?

George Bernard Shaw
I really don't think I could consent to go to Heaven if I thought there were no animals there.

George Bernard Shaw
Doctoring is not even the art of keeping people in health (no doctor seems able to advise you what to eat any better than his grandmother or the nearest quack): it is the art of curing illnesses.

George Bernard Shaw
If you cannot have what you believe in you must believe in what you have.

George Bernard Shaw
My heart, my heart, be whole and free: Love is thine only enemy.

George Bernard Shaw
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