George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

If you strike a child take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.

George Bernard Shaw
Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?

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

George Bernard Shaw
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

George Bernard Shaw
Why should you call me to account for eating decently?

George Bernard Shaw
But for this very reason no doctor dare accuse another of malpractice. He is not sure enough of his own opinion to ruin another man by it.

George Bernard Shaw
In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.

George Bernard Shaw
Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

George Bernard Shaw
Cusins is a very nice fellow, certainly: nobody would ever guess that he was born in Australia.

George Bernard Shaw
Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.

George Bernard Shaw
What is any respectable girl brought up to do but to catch some rich man's fancy and get the benefit of his money by marrying him?--as if a marriage ceremony could make any difference in the right or wrong of the thing!

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

George Bernard Shaw
But no public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means; and I have no reason to hope that Mr Coote may be an exception to the rule.

George Bernard Shaw
Doctoring is not even the art of keeping people in health (no doctor seems able to advise you what to eat any better than his grandmother or the nearest quack): it is the art of curing illnesses.

George Bernard Shaw
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

George Bernard Shaw
The test to which all methods of treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to doctors or not.

George Bernard Shaw
Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.

George Bernard Shaw
You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

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

George Bernard Shaw
I don't want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady.

George Bernard Shaw
The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.

George Bernard Shaw
He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.

George Bernard Shaw
If the medical profession were to outdo the Anti-Vivisection Societies in a general professional protest against the practice and principles of the vivisectors, every doctor in the kingdom would gain substantially by the immense relief and reconciliation which would follow such a reassurance of the humanity of the doctor.

George Bernard Shaw
All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.

George Bernard Shaw