George Bernard Shaw Quotes

670 Sourced Quotes

The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.

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
A contract for better for worse is a contract that should not be tolerated.

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

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

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

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
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
My business tonight will be very largely to raise difficulties. That is all the use I am really in this world.

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

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

George Bernard Shaw
The practical question, then, is what to do with the children. Tolerate them at home we will not. Let them run loose in the streets we dare not until our streets become safe places for children, which, to our utter shame, they are not at present, though they can hardly be worse than some homes and some schools.

George Bernard Shaw
[...] any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.

George Bernard Shaw
My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I'm a free citizen.

George Bernard Shaw
It is one of the mysterious ways of Allah to make women troublesome when he makes them beautiful.

George Bernard Shaw
There is nothing like biology. "The cloud-capped towers, the solemn binnacles, the gorgeous temples, the great globe itself: yea, all that it inherit shall dissolve, and, like this influential parent faded, leave not a rack behind." That's biology, you know. Good sound biology.

George Bernard Shaw
Mind you, that you have a sound scientific theory to correlate your observations at the bedside. Mere experience by itself is nothing. If I take my dog to the bedside with me, he sees what I see. But he learns nothing from it. Why? Because he's not a scientific dog.

George Bernard Shaw
DON JUAN: Stupidity has all the knowledge, and Imagination all the intelligence.

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
Why the men who believe in electrons should regard themselves as less credulous than the men who believed in angels is not apparent to me.

George Bernard Shaw
The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.

George Bernard Shaw
When a bishop at the first shot abandons the worship of Christ and rallies his flock round the altar of Mars, he may be acting patriotically... but that does not justify him in pretending...that Christ is, in effect, Mars.

George Bernard Shaw
The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

George Bernard Shaw
Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma.

George Bernard Shaw
Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.

George Bernard Shaw
Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist.

George Bernard Shaw