George Bernard Shaw Quotes (675 Quotes)

We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

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.

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.

It's just as unpleasant to get more than you bargain for as to get less.

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Make it compulsory for a doctor using a brass plate to have inscribed on it, in addition to the letters indicating his qualifications, the words 'Remember that I too am mortal'.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

The pianoforte is the most important of all musical instruments its invention was to music what the invention of printing was to poetry

Civilized society is one huge bourgeoisie no nobleman dares now shock his greengrocer.

It is the highest creatures who take the longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity.

My mother married a very good man . . . and she is not at all keen on my doing the same.

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.

Life is a flame that is always burning itself out, but it catches fire again every time a child is born

When you are so poor that you cannot afford to refuse eighteenpence from a man who is too poor to pay you any more, it is useless to tell him that what he or his sick child needs is not medicine, but more leisure, better clothes, better food. . .

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

Woman reduces us all to a common denominator.

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.

When an apparent miracle happened.it proved divine mission to the credulous, and proved a contract with the devil to the skeptical.

You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"

What is laisser-faire but an orthodoxy The most tyrannous and disastrous of all the orthodoxies, since it forbids you even to learn.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols or bombs without incurring any penalties.

All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.

Morality is not respectability.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.

Capitalism justified itself and was adopted as an economic principle on the express ground that it provides selfish motives for doing good, and that human beings will do nothing except for selfish motives

Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

I'm only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller.

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

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.

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.

The established government has no more right to call itself the state than the smoke of London has to call itself the weather.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.

If all you are going to do in life are the things that are convenient and comfortable, the great things never get done.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.

Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Get married, but never to a man who is home all day