George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

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
My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child's soul through the dirt.

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
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
DRIER: Mr. Shaw, do you believe in life on other planets?
SHAW: Indeed I do.
DRIER: But, Mr. Shaw, what proof do you have? Shaw: The proof is that they're using us for an insane asylum.

George Bernard Shaw
The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law. Virtually there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for the cunning and another for the simple, one law for the forceful and another for the feeble, one law for the ignorant and another for the learned, one law for the brave and another for the timid, and within family limits one law for the parent and no law at all for the child.

George Bernard Shaw
If 'Pygmalion' is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary.

George Bernard Shaw
The real moment of success is not the moment apparent to the crowd.

George Bernard Shaw
The notion that therapeutics or hygiene or surgery is any more or less scientific than making or cleaning boots is entertained only by people to whom a man of science is still a magician who can cure diseases, transmute metals, and enable us to live forever.

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
Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance.

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

George Bernard Shaw
Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.

George Bernard Shaw
It is not enough to know what is good: you must be able to do 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
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
Even trained statisticians often fail to appreciate the extent to which statistics are vitiated by the unrecorded assumptions of their interpreters.

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