George Bernard Shaw - Man Quotes

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A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

George Bernard Shaw
Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar! I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day's deed, and think my night's thought.

George Bernard Shaw
A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

George Bernard Shaw
The last word remains with Christ and Handel; and this must stand as the best defence of Tolerance until a better man than I makes a better job of it.
Put shortly and undramatically the case is that a civilization cannot progress without criticism, and must therefore, to save itself from stagnation and putrefaction, declare impunity for criticism. This means impunity not only for propositions which, however novel, seem interesting, statesmanlike, and respectable, but for propositions that shock the uncritical as obscene, seditious, blasphemous, heretical, and revolutionary.

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

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

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
The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [indicating her body], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.

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

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

George Bernard Shaw
What God hath joined together no man ever shall put asunder: God will take care of that.

George Bernard Shaw
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.

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

George Bernard Shaw
But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

George Bernard Shaw
The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.

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
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
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
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 truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true: what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him.

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
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 notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.

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
Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

George Bernard Shaw