George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

The open mind never acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions.

George Bernard Shaw
I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On.

George Bernard Shaw
I make no vows. I take my chance. … It means that I fear certainty as you fear uncertainty. It means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.

George Bernard Shaw
It is not pleasure that makes life worth living. It is life that makes pleasure worth having.

George Bernard Shaw
When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.

George Bernard Shaw
In gambling the many must lose in order that the few may win.

George Bernard Shaw
Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

George Bernard Shaw
To endure the pain of living, we all drug ourselves more or less with gin, with literature, with superstitions, with romance, with idealism, political, sentimental, and moral, with every possible preparation of that universal hashish: imagination.

George Bernard Shaw
I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

George Bernard Shaw
The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plains.

George Bernard Shaw
The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.

George Bernard Shaw
The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

George Bernard Shaw
Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

George Bernard Shaw
You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

George Bernard Shaw
The weakness of the man who, when his theory works out into a flagrant contradiction of the facts, concludes "so much the worse for the facts: let them be altered," instead of "so much the worse for my theory."

George Bernard Shaw
Let not the right side of your brain know what the left side doeth.

George Bernard Shaw
It is long and hard and painful to create life: it is short and easy to steal the life others have made.

George Bernard Shaw
Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons

George Bernard Shaw
Nobody supposes that doctors are less virtuous than judges;
but a judge whose salary and reputation depended on whether
the verdict was for plaintiff or defendant, prosecutor or prisoner,
would be as little trusted as a general in the pay of the enemy.

George Bernard Shaw
The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.

George Bernard Shaw
Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.

George Bernard Shaw
It is not true that men can be divided into absolutely honest persons and absolutely dishonest ones. Our honesty varies with the strain put on it.

George Bernard Shaw
I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical.

George Bernard Shaw
The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.

George Bernard Shaw
Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say 'No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.

George Bernard Shaw
There is only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory. For without that you cannot be born again.

George Bernard Shaw
The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all; it was Paul who converted the religion that has raised one man above sin and death.

George Bernard Shaw
When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.

George Bernard Shaw
The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.

George Bernard Shaw