George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

There is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her elder sister; and that is her mother.

George Bernard Shaw
Just as men imitate each other, germs imitate each other.

George Bernard Shaw
I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.

George Bernard Shaw
Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders.

George Bernard Shaw
In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.

George Bernard Shaw
Let no one suppose that the words doctor and patient can disguise from the parties the fact that they are employer and employee.

George Bernard Shaw
God's trustiest lieutenants often lack official credentials. They may be professed atheists who are also men of honour and high public spirit.

George Bernard Shaw
Jesus remains unshaken as the practical man; and we stand exposed as the fools, the blunderers, the unpractical visionaries.

George Bernard Shaw
The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.

George Bernard Shaw
When men die of disease they are said to die from
natural causes. When they recover (and mostly they do)
the doctor gets the credit of curing them.

George Bernard Shaw
If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else.

George Bernard Shaw
It is in the hour of trial that a man finds his true profession.

George Bernard Shaw
Sexually,Woman is Nature's contrivance for perpetuating its highest achievement.

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
Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.

George Bernard Shaw
There is the eternal war between those who are in the world for what they can get out of it and those who are in the world to make it a better place for everybody to live in.

George Bernard Shaw
The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.

George Bernard Shaw
All roads end at the grave, which is the gate to nothingness.

George Bernard Shaw
A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.

George Bernard Shaw
My business tonight will be very largely to raise difficulties. That is all the use I am really in this world.

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
In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.

George Bernard Shaw
Medical science is as yet very imperfectly differentiated from common cure-mongering witchcraft

George Bernard Shaw
Science could stand a cruel and unjust god; for nature was full of suffering and injustice. But a disorderly [god] was impossible.

George Bernard Shaw
The degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion.

George Bernard Shaw
Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words 'Remember that I too am mortal'.

George Bernard Shaw
There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.

George Bernard Shaw
Christianity as a specific doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and utterly. He was hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you please), before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the level of the thing it has remained ever since.

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

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

George Bernard Shaw