George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

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
He said that private practice in medicine ought to be put down by law. When I asked him why, he said that private doctors were ignorant licensed murders.

George Bernard Shaw
All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins?

George Bernard Shaw
Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

George Bernard Shaw
Nothing remains beautiful and interesting except thought, because the thought is the life.

George Bernard Shaw
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.

George Bernard Shaw
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels.

George Bernard Shaw
I ask you, what am I? I'm one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man.

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
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
We have in England a curious belief in first-rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable second-rateness of the people we do know.

George Bernard Shaw
Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.

George Bernard Shaw
The law is equal before all of us; but we are not all equal before the law. Virtually there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, one law for the cunning and another for the simple, one law for the forceful and another for the feeble, one law for the ignorant and another for the learned, one law for the brave and another for the timid, and within family limits one law for the parent and no law at all for the child.

George Bernard Shaw
The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.

George Bernard Shaw
Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think.

George Bernard Shaw
God has given us a world that nothing but our own folly keeps from being a paradise.

George Bernard Shaw
[Dancing is] a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

George Bernard Shaw
Again, there is the illusion of "increased command over Nature," meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man's increased command over Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us.

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
You propound a complicated mathematical problem: give me a slate and half an hour's time, and I can produce a wrong answer.

George Bernard Shaw
Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

George Bernard Shaw
I don't want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I might want to kill…I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioner and say every 5 years or every 7 years…just put them there and say, 'Sir or madam will you be kind enough to justify your existence…if you're not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little bit more then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive. Because your life does not benefit us and it can't be of very much use to yourself.'

George Bernard Shaw
It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.

George Bernard Shaw
Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

George Bernard Shaw
Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.

George Bernard Shaw