George Bernard Shaw - Man Quotes

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A man who has no office to go to—I don't care who he is—is a trial of which you can have no conception.

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
In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine.

George Bernard Shaw
Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say 'No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.

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
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

George Bernard Shaw
Man can climb to the highest summits; but he cannot dwell there long.

George Bernard Shaw
Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

George Bernard Shaw
Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.

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
It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good. Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal.

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
In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.

George Bernard Shaw
The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.

George Bernard Shaw
A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

George Bernard Shaw
A tranquil woman can go on sewing longer than an angry man can go on fuming.

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
If a man is indolent, let him be poor. If he is drunken, let him be poor.... Also--somewhat inconsistently--blessed are the poor!

George Bernard Shaw
The pursuit of omnipotence and omniscience. Greater power and greater knowledge: these are what we are all pursuing even at the risk of our lives and the sacrifice of our pleasures. Evolution is that pursuit and nothing else. It is the path to godhead. A man differs from a microbe only in being further on the path.

George Bernard Shaw
When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind.

George Bernard Shaw
The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.

George Bernard Shaw
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

George Bernard Shaw
A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.

George Bernard Shaw
The notion that therapeutics or hygiene or surgery is any more or less scientific than making or cleaning boots is entertained only by people to whom a man of science is still a magician who can cure diseases, transmute metals, and enable us to live forever.

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

George Bernard Shaw
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

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
Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

George Bernard Shaw
It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.

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