George Bernard Shaw quotes

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.

Youth is wasted on the young.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

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

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

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

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.

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

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

My reputation grows with every failure.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

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.

The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

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

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

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

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

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.

Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.

Syllables govern the world.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider!

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

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.

If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it.

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

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

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

If you're not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can't be of very much use to yourself.

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

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.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

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

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.

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

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

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

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

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

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

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

Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

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

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.

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

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

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

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

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

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.

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