George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanginary execution after torture, for its central mystery is an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of equality and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance.

George Bernard Shaw
Let not the right side of your brain know what the left side doeth.

George Bernard Shaw
It is long and hard and painful to create life: it is short and easy to steal the life others have made.

George Bernard Shaw
Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons

George Bernard Shaw
Nobody supposes that doctors are less virtuous than judges;
but a judge whose salary and reputation depended on whether
the verdict was for plaintiff or defendant, prosecutor or prisoner,
would be as little trusted as a general in the pay of the enemy.

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

George Bernard Shaw
Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.

George Bernard Shaw
It is not true that men can be divided into absolutely honest persons and absolutely dishonest ones. Our honesty varies with the strain put on it.

George Bernard Shaw
I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical.

George Bernard Shaw
The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.

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
The weakness of the man who, when his theory works out into a flagrant contradiction of the facts, concludes "so much the worse for the facts: let them be altered," instead of "so much the worse for my theory."

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

George Bernard Shaw
If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.

George Bernard Shaw
You cannot learn to skate without making yourself ridiculous - the ice of life is slippery.

George Bernard Shaw
Faith in reason as a prime motor is no longer the criterion of the sound mind, any more than faith in the Bible is the criterion of righteous intention.

George Bernard Shaw
The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.

George Bernard Shaw
The conversion of Paul was no conversion at all; it was Paul who converted the religion that has raised one man above sin and death.

George Bernard Shaw
When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.

George Bernard Shaw
There is only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its victory. For without that you cannot be born again.

George Bernard Shaw
An interesting play cannot in the nature of things mean anything but a play in which problems of conduct and character of personalimportance to the audience are raised and suggestively discussed.

George Bernard Shaw
The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.

George Bernard Shaw
Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.

George Bernard Shaw
Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.

George Bernard Shaw
Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor: not even a poor employer or a poor landlord.

George Bernard Shaw
He who has nothing to assert has no style and can have none: he who has something to assert will go as far in power of style as its momentousness and his conviction will carry him

George Bernard Shaw
No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.

George Bernard Shaw
No doubt it is natural to a snail to think that any evolution which threatens to do away with shells will result in general death from exposure.

George Bernard Shaw
Women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men.

George Bernard Shaw
What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.

George Bernard Shaw