George Bernard Shaw - Major Barbara (1905)

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He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

George Bernard Shaw
Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons

George Bernard Shaw
What a man is depends on his character; but what he does, and what we think of what he does, depends on his circumstances.

George Bernard Shaw
Like all young men, you greatly exaggerate the difference between one young woman and another.

George Bernard Shaw
Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make … lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.

George Bernard Shaw
That is the injustice of a woman's lot. A woman has to bring up her children; and that means to restrain them, to deny them things they want, to set them tasks, to punish them when they do wrong, to do all the unpleasant things. And then the father, who has nothing to do but pet them and spoil them, comes in when all her work is done and steals their affection from her.

George Bernard Shaw
The greatest of our evils and the worst of our crimes is poverty.

George Bernard Shaw
I exclude the hypothesis of complete originality on [Charles] Lever's part, because a man can no more be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of air.

George Bernard Shaw
Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

George Bernard Shaw
Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanginary execution after torture, for its central mystery is an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of equality and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance.

George Bernard Shaw
He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

George Bernard Shaw
I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical.

George Bernard Shaw
Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?

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
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
Live in contact with dreams and you will get something of their charm: live in contact with facts and you will get something of their brutality. I wish I could find a country to live in where the facts were not brutal and the dreams not real.

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

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

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
No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who cares for a slave? If you come back, come back for the sake of good fellowship; for you'll get nothing else.

George Bernard Shaw
You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

George Bernard Shaw
Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. There's only one way of escaping trouble; and that's killing things.

George Bernard Shaw
Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound, or smell of it

George Bernard Shaw
Alcohol is a very necessary article…It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.

George Bernard Shaw
Undershaft: You have made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what not. It doesn't fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit. That is what is wrong with the world at present. It scraps its obsolete steam engines and dynamos; but it won't scrap its old prejudices and its old moralities and its old religions and its old political constitutions. Whats the result? In machinery it does very well; but in morals and religion and politics it is working at a loss that brings it nearer bankruptcy every year.

George Bernard Shaw
At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.

George Bernard Shaw
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.

George Bernard Shaw
I am a sort of collector of religions: and the curious thing is that I find I can believe in them all.

George Bernard Shaw
You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

George Bernard Shaw
Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman.

George Bernard Shaw