George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

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
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.

George Bernard Shaw
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

George Bernard Shaw
A king is not allowed the luxury of a good character. Our country has produced millions of blameless greengrocers, but not one blameless monarch.

George Bernard Shaw
In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

George Bernard Shaw
If a man is indolent, let him be poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor.... Also--somewhat inconsistently--blessed are the poor!

George Bernard Shaw
It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good. Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal.

George Bernard Shaw
Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.

George Bernard Shaw
Life is a flame that is always burning itself out; but it catches fire again every time a child is born.

George Bernard Shaw
The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.

George Bernard Shaw
Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors.

George Bernard Shaw
There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

George Bernard Shaw
Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.

George Bernard Shaw
Even trained statisticians often fail to appreciate the extent to which statistics are vitiated by the unrecorded assumptions of their interpreters.

George Bernard Shaw
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.

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