Shaw, George Bernard
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Shaw, George Bernard
How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.
Shaw, George Bernard
Contradiction
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.
Shaw, George Bernard
Coward and Cowardice
We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
Shaw, George Bernard
Cooperation
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Cynics and Cynicism
We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?
Shaw, George Bernard
Churches
I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
Shaw, George Bernard
Courage
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
Shaw, George Bernard
Democracy
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
Shaw, George Bernard
Duty
I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.
Shaw, George Bernard
Convalescence
In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Danger
An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Elections
Find enough clever things to say, and you re a Prime Minister; write them down and you re a Shakespeare.
Shaw, George Bernard
Cleverness
The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.
Shaw, George Bernard
Idols
The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.
Shaw, George Bernard
Doctors
I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That s right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That s democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.
Shaw, George Bernard
Democracy
What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.
Shaw, George Bernard
Churches
The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
Shaw, George Bernard
Crime and Criminals
If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
Shaw, George Bernard
Economy and Economics
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
Shaw, George Bernard
Change
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
Shaw, George Bernard
Change
Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
Shaw, George Bernard
Elections
The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.
Shaw, George Bernard
Constitutions
My way of joking is to tell the truth. It s the funniest joke in the world.
Shaw, George Bernard
Jokes and Jokers
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
Shaw, George Bernard
Dissatisfaction
The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.
Shaw, George Bernard
Christians and Christianity
No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
Shaw, George Bernard
Crafts
The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
Shaw, George Bernard
Debt
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.
Shaw, George Bernard
Censorship
Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.
Shaw, George Bernard
Desire
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.
Shaw, George Bernard
Credulity
Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away.
Shaw, George Bernard
Doctors
Suppose the world were only one of God s jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?
Shaw, George Bernard
Jokes and Jokers
We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession.
Shaw, George Bernard
Faith
What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.
Shaw, George Bernard
Flattery
Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.
Shaw, George Bernard
Equality
The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
Shaw, George Bernard
Gossip
Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Fools and Foolishness
Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life.
Shaw, George Bernard
Happiness
Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.
Shaw, George Bernard
Life and Living
The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.
Shaw, George Bernard
Forgiveness
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Happiness
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
Shaw, George Bernard
Life and Living
That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.
Shaw, George Bernard
Fights and Fighting
A lifetime of happiness? No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.
Shaw, George Bernard
Happiness
There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
Shaw, George Bernard
Food and Eating
Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.
Shaw, George Bernard
Life and Living
A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.
Shaw, George Bernard
Fellowship
As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Improvement
Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.
Shaw, George Bernard
Payment
My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately
Shaw, George Bernard
Fathers
He didn t dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life.
Shaw, George Bernard
Family
To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching Man to regard himself as an experiment in the realization of God, to regard his hands as God s hand, his brain as God s brain, his purpose as God s purpose. He must regard God as a helpless Longing, which longed him into existence by its desperate need for an executive organ.
Shaw, George Bernard
God
The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
Shaw, George Bernard
Government
It s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
Shaw, George Bernard
Generations
Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
Shaw, George Bernard
Exaggeration
Gambling promises the poor what property performs for the rich, something for nothing.
Shaw, George Bernard
Gambling
Hatred is the coward s revenge for being intimidated.
Shaw, George Bernard
Hatred
If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not an example.
Shaw, George Bernard
Example
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
Shaw, George Bernard
Experience
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
Shaw, George Bernard
Forgiveness
When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices.
Shaw, George Bernard
Family
Give a man health and a course to steer; and he ll never stop to trouble about whether he s happy or not.
Shaw, George Bernard
Happiness
Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.
Shaw, George Bernard
Health
Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.
Shaw, George Bernard
Government
No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
Shaw, George Bernard
Experts
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!
Shaw, George Bernard
Experience
Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
Shaw, George Bernard
Experience
I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize.
Shaw, George Bernard
Evil
You don t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.
Shaw, George Bernard
Growth
The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
Shaw, George Bernard
Gardening and Gardens
The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.
Shaw, George Bernard
Friends and Friendship
It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
Shaw, George Bernard
Heartbreak
The worst sin... is... to be indifferent.
Shaw, George Bernard
Indifference
You will never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
Shaw, George Bernard
Patriotism
Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
Shaw, George Bernard
Patriotism
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Patriotism
A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
Shaw, George Bernard
Hell
Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.
Shaw, George Bernard
Hell
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
Shaw, George Bernard
Giving
A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.
Shaw, George Bernard
Heartbreak
Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.
Shaw, George Bernard
Fashion
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
Shaw, George Bernard
Future
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that s the essence of inhumanity.
Shaw, George Bernard
Indifference
But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
Shaw, George Bernard
Friends and Friendship
Reminiscences make one feel so deliciously aged and sad.
Shaw, George Bernard
Memory
We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!
Shaw, George Bernard
Madness
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Liberty
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Literature
The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.
Shaw, George Bernard
Joy
Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
Shaw, George Bernard
Humankind
Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.
Shaw, George Bernard
Law and Lawyers
The liar s punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
Shaw, George Bernard
Lies and Lying
Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.
Shaw, George Bernard
Jealousy
The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
Shaw, George Bernard
Love
Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
Shaw, George Bernard
Self-sacrifice
We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
Shaw, George Bernard
Honesty
All problems are finally scientific problems.
Shaw, George Bernard
Problems
There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
Shaw, George Bernard
Marriage
Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
Shaw, George Bernard
Marriage
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.
Shaw, George Bernard
Marriage
There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.
Shaw, George Bernard
Human Nature
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
Shaw, George Bernard
Hunting
The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.
Shaw, George Bernard
Judaism and Jews
Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real center of the household.
Shaw, George Bernard
Horses
When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
Shaw, George Bernard
Marriage
Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.
Shaw, George Bernard
Leisure
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 third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.
Shaw, George Bernard
Manners
Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.
Shaw, George Bernard
Intentions
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Language
Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.
Shaw, George Bernard
Imagination
If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.
Shaw, George Bernard
Language
A man s interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.
Shaw, George Bernard
Interest
I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Ideas
First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity: no really self-respecting woman would take advantage of it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Love
He who has never hoped can never despair.
Shaw, George Bernard
Hope
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.
Shaw, George Bernard
Humankind
The camera can represent flesh so superbly that, if I dared, I would never photograph a figure without asking that figure to take its clothes off.
Shaw, George Bernard
Photography
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
Shaw, George Bernard
Kings
All progress means war with society.
Shaw, George Bernard
Progress
Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.
Shaw, George Bernard
Morality
No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn t actually fall down.
Shaw, George Bernard
Trade Unions
Lack of money is the root of all evil.
Shaw, George Bernard
Money
Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.
Shaw, George Bernard
Money
Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.
Shaw, George Bernard
Money
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
Shaw, George Bernard
Mistakes
All professions are conspiracies against the laity.
Shaw, George Bernard
Professions and Professionals
All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions.
Shaw, George Bernard
Progress
Common people do not pray; they only beg.
Shaw, George Bernard
Prayer
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Shaw, George Bernard
Prison
An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
Shaw, George Bernard
Morality
He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Motives
The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty. Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.
Shaw, George Bernard
Money
Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.
Shaw, George Bernard
Music
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
Shaw, George Bernard
Parasites
My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.
Shaw, George Bernard
Plays
In order to fully realize how bad a popular play can be, it is necessary to see it twice.
Shaw, George Bernard
Plays
A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.
Shaw, George Bernard
Miracles
If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.
Shaw, George Bernard
Men and Women
Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous
Shaw, George Bernard
Peace
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
Shaw, George Bernard
Sanity
I have to live for others and not for myself: that s middle-class morality.
Shaw, George Bernard
Middle Class
The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
Shaw, George Bernard
Morality
We mustn t be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.
Shaw, George Bernard
Politicians and Politics
Man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid of.
Shaw, George Bernard
Men
The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.
Shaw, George Bernard
Population
Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.
Shaw, George Bernard
Truth
There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart s desire. The other is to get it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Tragedies
The philosopher is Nature s pilot. And there you have our difference: to be n hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
Shaw, George Bernard
Philosophers and Philosophy
Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.
Shaw, George Bernard
Nationalities and Nationalism
The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
Shaw, George Bernard
Misers and Misery
He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
Shaw, George Bernard
Politicians and Politics
A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself.
Shaw, George Bernard
Pessimism
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
Shaw, George Bernard
Truth
If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn t be anything for us to do.
Shaw, George Bernard
Perfection
The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can t find them, make them.
Shaw, George Bernard
Opportunity
You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.
Shaw, George Bernard
Power
The seven deadly sins... food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones from Man s neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted.
Shaw, George Bernard
Poverty and The Poor
The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.
Shaw, George Bernard
Poverty and The Poor
Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
Shaw, George Bernard
Power
Property is organized robbery.
Shaw, George Bernard
Property
I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.
Shaw, George Bernard
Nations
The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
Shaw, George Bernard
Right and Rightness
What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
Shaw, George Bernard
Teachers and Teaching
Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
Shaw, George Bernard
Reasonableness
Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.
Shaw, George Bernard
Science and Scientists
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
Shaw, George Bernard
Teachers and Teaching
No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.
Shaw, George Bernard
Questions
I don t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.
Shaw, George Bernard
Speech
My reputation grew with every failure.
Shaw, George Bernard
Reputation
Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.
Shaw, George Bernard
Royalty
Science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating ten more.
Shaw, George Bernard
Science and Scientists
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.
Shaw, George Bernard
Reasonableness
A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most. On Other Peoples Expectations: The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
Shaw, George Bernard
Self-Conflict
Self-denial is not a virtue, it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.
Shaw, George Bernard
Self-denial
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.
Shaw, George Bernard
Unemployment
Success covers a multitude of blunders.
Shaw, George Bernard
Success
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.
Shaw, George Bernard
Purpose
I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
Shaw, George Bernard
Quotations
I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.
Shaw, George Bernard
Success
Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.
Shaw, George Bernard
Revolutions and Revolutionaries
What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.
Shaw, George Bernard
Riches
I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.
Shaw, George Bernard
Thoughts and Thinking
Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself thinking once or twice a week.
Shaw, George Bernard
Thoughts and Thinking
There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Religion
My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
Shaw, George Bernard
Religion
All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of story-tellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.
Shaw, George Bernard
Religion
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
Shaw, George Bernard
Sincerity
A man of great common sense and good taste -- meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
Shaw, George Bernard
Taste
A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.
Shaw, George Bernard
Sleep
It is easy -- terribly easy -- to shake a man s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man s spirit is devil s work.
Shaw, George Bernard
self-confidence
Well, dearie, men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability. But you can t blame them for that, can you?
Shaw, George Bernard
Respectability
It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
Shaw, George Bernard
Thoughts and Thinking
I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.
Shaw, George Bernard
Retirement
We know there is intention and purpose in the universe, because there is intention and purpose in us.
Shaw, George Bernard
Purpose
The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.
Shaw, George Bernard
Riches
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
Shaw, George Bernard
Secrets
Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
Shaw, George Bernard
Silence
We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.
Shaw, George Bernard
Shame
Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog s life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.
Shaw, George Bernard
Travel and Tourism
The test of a man or woman s breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
Shaw, George Bernard
Quarrels
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
Shaw, George Bernard
Taxes and Taxation
The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.
Shaw, George Bernard
Unhappiness
We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
Shaw, George Bernard
Soul
Better never than late.
Shaw, George Bernard
Punctuality
When Satan makes impure verses, Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them.
Shaw, George Bernard
Song and Singing
Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.
Shaw, George Bernard
Servants
It has taken me nearly twenty years of studied self-restraint, aided by the natural decay of my faculties, to make myself dull enough to be accepted as a serious person by the British public; and I am not sure that I am not still regarded as a suspicious character in some quarters.
Shaw, George Bernard
Public
I m only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.
Shaw, George Bernard
Alcohol and Alcoholism
In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it s more dangerous to lose than to win.
Shaw, George Bernard
Battles
Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one s heart; but death is a splendid thing --a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.
Shaw, George Bernard
Death and Dying
In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
Shaw, George Bernard
Angels
The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Conversion
Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.
Shaw, George Bernard
Ancestry
The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.
Shaw, George Bernard
Anarchism
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
Shaw, George Bernard
Beauty
I m not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead -- ahead of myself as well as you.
Shaw, George Bernard
Advice
You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
Shaw, George Bernard
Heroes and Heroism
Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.
Shaw, George Bernard
Achievement
She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
Shaw, George Bernard
Conversation
Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.
Shaw, George Bernard
Consequences
Old men are dangerous: it doesn t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
Shaw, George Bernard
Age and Aging
A perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
Shaw, George Bernard
Dance and Dancing
Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
Shaw, George Bernard
Amusement
I want to be all used up when I die.
Shaw, George Bernard
Death and Dying
Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
Shaw, George Bernard
Acting and Actors
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.
Shaw, George Bernard
Benefactors
I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.
Shaw, George Bernard
Creeds
If you value a man s regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper -- and despise it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Affection
Don t order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple. Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don t know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond.
Shaw, George Bernard
Bereavement
People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can t find them, make them.
Shaw, George Bernard
Circumstance
Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.
Shaw, George Bernard
Death and Dying
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
Shaw, George Bernard
Age and Aging
Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
Shaw, George Bernard
Arts and Artists
You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.
Shaw, George Bernard
Bigotry
What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.
Shaw, George Bernard
Education
Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
Shaw, George Bernard
Ability
How can you dare teach a man to read until you ve taught him everything else first?
Shaw, George Bernard
Books - Reading
I m an atheist and I thank God for it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Atheism
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
Shaw, George Bernard
Assassination
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.
Shaw, George Bernard
Youth
Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.
Shaw, George Bernard
Work
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
Shaw, George Bernard
Writers and Writing
It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
Shaw, George Bernard
Youth
Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.
Shaw, George Bernard
Youth
When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.
Shaw, George Bernard
Villains
You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.
Shaw, George Bernard
Writers and Writing
Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
Shaw, George Bernard
Youth
Better keep yourself clean and bright. You are the window through which you must see the world.
Shaw, George Bernard
Virtue
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
Shaw, George Bernard
Virtue
This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.
Shaw, George Bernard
Wives
Some men see things as they are and say, Why? I of dream things that never were, and say, Why not?
Shaw, George Bernard
Vision
Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
Shaw, George Bernard
Voting
If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.
Shaw, George Bernard
Violence
When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn t want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work.
Shaw, George Bernard
Work, Hard
A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.
Shaw, George Bernard
Vegetarianism
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.
Shaw, George Bernard
War
The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
Shaw, George Bernard
Wisdom
The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.
Shaw, George Bernard
Women
What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
Shaw, George Bernard
Virtue