George Bernard Shaw Quotes (675 Quotes)


    Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time

    Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.

    If you say that God is good, great, blessed, wise or any such thing, the starting point is this God is.

    We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time, or we shall stick in the mud. Yet neither must we undertake a new world as catastrophic Utopians, and wreck our civilization in our hurry to mend it.



    The national anthem belongs to the eighteenth century. In it you find us ordering God about to do our political dirty work.

    It took me 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.

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

    No question is so difficult to answer as that which the answer is obvious.

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

    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.

    When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

    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.

    No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.


    Great Britain and the United States are nations separated by a common language.

    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. . .

    Self-denial is not a virtue it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

    Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend if you have one. Telegram inviting Winston Churchill to opening night of Pygmalion. Churchill wired back Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second if there is one.

    What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

    A man of great common sense and good taste is a man without originality or moral courage.


    Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

    A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

    Mark Twain and I are in the same position. We have put things in such a way as to make people, who would otherwise hang us, believe that we are joking.


    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.

    The true joy of life is being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one ... being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown to the scrap heap ... being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances.

    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.

    The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

    Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.


    You dont learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.


    Newspapers are unable, seemingly, to discriminate between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.

    You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.

    Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.



    I have made it so perfectly clear in my tracts, articles, and books what was to be done that all Parliament has had to do was read my works and do the opposite


    If you lived in London, where the whole system is one of false good-fellowship, and you may know a man for twenty years without finding out that he hates you like poison, you would soon have your eyes opened. There we do unkind things in a kind way we say bitter things in a sweet voice we always give our friends chloroform when we tear them to pieces.


    The true joy in life is being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.

    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.


    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.

    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.

    Englishmen never will be slaves they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do.

    No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.


    Related Authors


    William Shakespeare - Tennessee Williams - Oscar Wilde - George Bernard Shaw - Richard Steele - Lady Gregory - Henry Taylor - Henry Porter - George S. Kaufman - George Colman


Page 5 of 14 1 4 5 6 14

Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections