George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

It is evident that if the incomes of the rich were taken from them and divided among the poor as we stand at present, the poor would be very little less poor; the supply of capital would cease because nobody could afford to save; the country houses would fall into ruins; and learning and science and art and literature and all the rest of what we call culture would perish.

George Bernard Shaw
Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

George Bernard Shaw
In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.

George Bernard Shaw
Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.

George Bernard Shaw
Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

George Bernard Shaw
They have accepted the burden of eternal life. They have taken the agony from birth; and their life does not fail them even in the hour of their destruction.

George Bernard Shaw
THE HE-ANCIENT: When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth
STREPHON: Yes; and take all the fun out of it.

George Bernard Shaw
A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

George Bernard Shaw
Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

George Bernard Shaw
I exclude the hypothesis of complete originality on [Charles] Lever's part, because a man can no more be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of air.

George Bernard Shaw
Liza: My aunt died of influenza: so they said … But it's my belief (as how) they done the old woman in.

George Bernard Shaw
Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.

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

George Bernard Shaw
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

George Bernard Shaw
All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

George Bernard Shaw
The greatest of our evils and the worst of our crimes is poverty.

George Bernard Shaw
We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!

George Bernard Shaw
The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

George Bernard Shaw
The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.

George Bernard Shaw
I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly tell our children that honesty is the best policy.

George Bernard Shaw
It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.

George Bernard Shaw
The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.

George Bernard Shaw
Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make … lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.

George Bernard Shaw
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.

George Bernard Shaw
There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates, who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.

George Bernard Shaw
A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.

George Bernard Shaw
You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.

George Bernard Shaw
The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.

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