George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

No child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor.

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
KNELLER: Just what such blockheads would believe. The circle is a dead thing like a straight line: no living hand can draw it: you make it by twirling a pair of dividers.

George Bernard Shaw
Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.

George Bernard Shaw
A doctor's reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.

George Bernard Shaw
I am a woman of the world, Hector; and I can assure you that if you will only take the trouble always to do the perfectly correct thing, and to say the perfectly correct thing, you can do just what you like.

George Bernard Shaw
What hope is there then of human improvement? According to the Neo-Darwinists, to the Mechanists, no hope whatever, because improvement can come only through some senseless accident which must, on the statistical average of accidents, be presently wiped out by some other equally senseless accident.

George Bernard Shaw
The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.

George Bernard Shaw
A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles…Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.

George Bernard Shaw
Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.

George Bernard Shaw
PATIOKIM: In Russia we face facts.
EDSTATON: In England, sir, a gentleman never faces any fact if they are unpleasant facts.
PATIOKIM: In real life, all facts are unpleasant.

George Bernard Shaw
I did not throw myself into the struggle for life: I threw my mother into it.

George Bernard Shaw
Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor: not even a poor employer or a poor landlord.

George Bernard Shaw
If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.

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
[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 man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

George Bernard Shaw
Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

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

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

George Bernard Shaw