George Bernard Shaw - Human Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

View all George Bernard Shaw Quotes
The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

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

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
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
Worst of all, there is no sign of any relaxation of antisemitism. Logically it has nothing to do with Fascism. But the human raceis imitative rather than logical; and as Fascism spreads antisemitism spreads.

George Bernard Shaw
What hope is there then of human improvement? According to the Neo-Darwinists, to the Mechanists, no hope whatever, because improvement can come only through some senseless accident which must, on the statistical average of accidents, be presently wiped out by some other equally senseless accident.

George Bernard Shaw
There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.

George Bernard Shaw
Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family.

George Bernard Shaw
People will have their miracles, their stories, their heroes and heroines and saints and martyrs and divinities to exercise their gifts of affection, admiration, wonder, and worship, and their Judases and devils to enable them to be angry and yet feel that they do well to be angry. Every one of these legends is the common heritage of the human race; and there is only one inexorable condition attached to their healthy enjoyment, which is that no one shall believe them literally. The reading of stories and delighting in them made Don Quixote a gentleman: the believing them literally made him a madman who slew lambs instead of feeding them.

George Bernard Shaw
Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.

George Bernard Shaw
The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

George Bernard Shaw
Nature holds no brief for the human experiment; it must stand or fall by its results.

George Bernard Shaw
The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.

George Bernard Shaw
Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst.

George Bernard Shaw
When domestic servants are treated as human beings it is not worth while to keep them.

George Bernard Shaw
It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income. … What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles?

George Bernard Shaw
Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

George Bernard Shaw
Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.

George Bernard Shaw
Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

George Bernard Shaw
Human affection…is the one great curse of mankind, the principal obstruction to its progress. Take myself, for instance; all my life affection has been showered on me, and everything that I have done I have had to do in spite of it.

George Bernard Shaw
You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

George Bernard Shaw