George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.

George Bernard Shaw
No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

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
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
O Lord! I don't know which is the worst of the country, the walking or the sitting at home with nothing to do.

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

George Bernard Shaw
Christianity as a specific doctrine was slain with Jesus, suddenly and utterly. He was hardly cold in his grave, or high in his heaven (as you please), before the apostles dragged the tradition of him down to the level of the thing it has remained ever since.

George Bernard Shaw
All roads end at the grave, which is the gate to nothingness.

George Bernard Shaw
A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.

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
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
In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.

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

George Bernard Shaw
Science could stand a cruel and unjust god; for nature was full of suffering and injustice. But a disorderly [god] was impossible.

George Bernard Shaw
The degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion.

George Bernard Shaw
Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words 'Remember that I too am mortal'.

George Bernard Shaw
There is nothing on earth more exquisite than a bonny book, with well-placed columns of rich black writing in beautiful borders, and illuminated pictures cunningly inset. But nowadays, instead of looking at books, people read them. A book might as well be one of those orders for bacon and bran.

George Bernard Shaw
It's prudent to gain the whole world and lose your own soul. But don't forget that your soul sticks to you if you stick to it; but the world has a way of slipping through your fingers.

George Bernard Shaw
How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?

George Bernard Shaw
No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.

George Bernard Shaw
But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.

George Bernard Shaw
The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery.

George Bernard Shaw
The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men.

George Bernard Shaw
Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment.

George Bernard Shaw