George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

The lesson intended by an author is hardly ever the lesson the world chooses to learn from his book.

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
Human misery is so appalling nowadays that if we allowed ourselves to dwell on it we should only add imaginary miseries of our own to the real miseries of others without doing them any good.

George Bernard Shaw
Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.

George Bernard Shaw
Those whom we called brutes had their revenge when Darwin showed us that they were our cousins.

George Bernard Shaw
As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.

George Bernard Shaw
All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake. Not that it's wrong to try to improve the world if you know how but simply because struggling and striving are the worst possible ways to go about doing anything!

George Bernard Shaw
Well, upon my soul! You are not ashamed to stand there and confess yourself a disgusting drunkard.

George Bernard Shaw
If the medical profession were to outdo the Anti-Vivisection Societies in a general professional protest against the practice and principles of the vivisectors, every doctor in the kingdom would gain substantially by the immense relief and reconciliation which would follow such a reassurance of the humanity of the doctor.

George Bernard Shaw
Those who understand the steam engine and the electric telegraph spend their lives in trying to replace them with something better.

George Bernard Shaw
I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everyone there looks an original.

George Bernard Shaw
KNELLER: Just what such blockheads would believe. The circle is a dead thing like a straight line: no living hand can draw it: you make it by twirling a pair of dividers.

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
KNELLER:...take a sugar loaf and cut it slantwise, and you will get hyperbolas and parabolas, ellipses and ovals.

George Bernard Shaw
Every moment of time dictated and determined the following moment, and was itself dictated and determined by the moment that came before it. Everything was calculable: everything happened because it must; the commandments were erased from the tables of the law; and in their place came the cosmic algebra: the equations of the mathematicians.

George Bernard Shaw
The most revolutionary invention of the Nineteenth Century was the artificial sterilization of marriage.

George Bernard Shaw
There is in man a specific lust for cruelty which infects even his passion of pity and makes it savage.

George Bernard Shaw
Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.

George Bernard Shaw
But for this very reason no doctor dare accuse another of malpractice. He is not sure enough of his own opinion to ruin another man by it.

George Bernard Shaw
Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it.

George Bernard Shaw
Blasphemy and sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State).

George Bernard Shaw
The poor silly-clever Irishman takes off his hat to God's Englishman.

George Bernard Shaw
If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.

George Bernard Shaw
When a lion meets another with a louder roar, the first lion thinks the last a bore.

George Bernard Shaw
A sensitive boy's humiliations may be very good fun for ordinary thick-skinned grown-ups; but to the boy himself theyareso acute, so ignominious, that he cannot confess themcannot but deny them passionately.

George Bernard Shaw
There are two things necessary to Salvation.... Money and gunpowder.

George Bernard Shaw
It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.

George Bernard Shaw
To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit: to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.

George Bernard Shaw
It is not the number of years we have behind us, but the number we have before us, that makes us careful and responsible and determined to find out the truth about everything.

George Bernard Shaw
Every dream is a prophecy: every jest is an earnest in the womb of Time.

George Bernard Shaw