George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

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
It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.

George Bernard Shaw
All professions are conspiracies against the laity.

George Bernard Shaw
A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavour to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

George Bernard Shaw
Women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men.

George Bernard Shaw
You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.

George Bernard Shaw
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

George Bernard Shaw
When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind.

George Bernard Shaw
I worship you, Eve. I must have something to worship. Something quite different to myself, like you. There must be something greater than the snake.

George Bernard Shaw
There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.

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