George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

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
All young women begin by believing they can change and reform the men they marry. They can't.

George Bernard Shaw
I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, ininvention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.

George Bernard Shaw
Every child has a right to its own bent.... It has a right to find its own way and go its own way, whether that way seems wise or foolish to others, exactly as an adult has. It has a right to privacy as to its own doings and its own affairs as much as if it were its own father.

George Bernard Shaw
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

George Bernard Shaw
If you can't appreciate what you've got, you'd better get what you can appreciate.

George Bernard Shaw
Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

George Bernard Shaw
The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

George Bernard Shaw
Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do.

George Bernard Shaw
An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.

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

George Bernard Shaw