George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

George Bernard Shaw
It's well to be off with the Old Woman before you're on with the New.

George Bernard Shaw
Religion is always right. Religion solves every problem and thereby abolishes problems from the Universe. Religion gives us certainty, stability, peace and the absolute. It protects us against progress which we all dread. Science is the very opposite. Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without raising ten more problems.

George Bernard Shaw
To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist.

George Bernard Shaw
Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman.

George Bernard Shaw
Heaven, as conventionally conceived, is a place so inane, so dull, so useless, so miserable that nobody has ever ventured to describe a whole day in heaven, though plenty of people have described a day at the seaside.

George Bernard Shaw
Every moment of time dictated and determined the following moment, and was itself dictated and determined by the moment that came before it. Everything was calculable: everything happened because it must; the commandments were erased from the tables of the law; and in their place came the cosmic algebra: the equations of the mathematicians.

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
Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

George Bernard Shaw
The psychology of fashion becomes a pathology; for the cases have every air of being genuine: fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen.

George Bernard Shaw
Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.

George Bernard Shaw
Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted?

George Bernard Shaw
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

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
The trouble, Mr Goldwyn, is that you are only interested in art and I am only interested in money.

George Bernard Shaw
If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.

George Bernard Shaw
Truth telling is not compatible with the defence of the realm.

George Bernard Shaw
It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman hate or despise him; English is not accessible even to Englishmen.

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
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.

George Bernard Shaw
Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment.

George Bernard Shaw
We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.

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
A contract for better for worse is a contract that should not be tolerated.

George Bernard Shaw
It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

George Bernard Shaw