George Bernard Shaw Quotes

HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man?DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.

~ George Bernard Shaw

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud, and the world overhears them

~ George Bernard Shaw

The problem with communication…is the illusion that is has been accomplished.

~ George Bernard Shaw

You cannot have qualifications without experience, and you cannot have experience without personal interest and bias. That may not be an ideal arrangement, but it is the way the world is built and we must make the best of it. p 242

~ George Bernard Shaw

I know your head aches. I know you're tired. I know your nerves are as raw as meat in a butcher's window. But think what you're trying to accomplish - just think what you're dealing with. The majesty and grandeur of the English language; it's the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative and musical mixtures of sounds. And that's what you've set yourself out to conquer, Eliza. And conquer it you will.

~ George Bernard Shaw

I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be.

~ George Bernard Shaw

HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well.

~ George Bernard Shaw

HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?MRS HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper - say on a canal barge...

~ George Bernard Shaw

A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere - no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift to articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton...

~ George Bernard Shaw

The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

~ George Bernard Shaw

THE DEVIL. As far as I went, yes. But I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving. But when you are as old as I am; when you have a thousand times wearied of heaven, like myself and the Commander, and a thousand times wearied of hell, as you are wearied now, you will no longer imagine that every swing from heaven to hell is an emancipation, every swing from hell to heaven an evolution. Where you now see reform, progress, fulfilment of upward tendency, continual ascent by Man on the stepping stones of his dead selves to higher things, you will see nothing but an infinite comedy of illusion....

~ George Bernard Shaw

Two percent of the people think, three percent of the people think they think, and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Confusing monogamy with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other error.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The risks of liberty we must let everyone take, but the risks of ignorance and self-helplessness are another matter.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Nothing but the natural ignorance of the public, countenanced by the inoculated erroneousness of the ordinary general medical practitioners, makes such a barbarism as vaccination possible.......Recent developments have shown that an inoculation made in the usual general practitioner's light-hearted way, without previous highly skilled examination of the state of the patient's blood, is just as likely to be a simple manslaughter as a cure or preventive. But vaccination is nothing short of attempted murder. A skilled bacteriologist would just as soon think of cutting his child's arm and rubbing the contents of the dustpan into the wound, as vaccinating it in the same.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.

~ George Bernard Shaw

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

~ George Bernard Shaw

There are no perfectly honorable men, but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.

~ George Bernard Shaw

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

~ George Bernard Shaw

The primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment's reflection will shew that this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the shedding of blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacrifice and expiation.

~ George Bernard Shaw

We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white, we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease, we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats, we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion, and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them.

~ George Bernard Shaw

HIGGINS [sitting down beside her] Rubbish! you shall marry an ambassador. You shall marry the Governor-General of India or the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, or somebody who wants a deputy-queen. I'm not going to have my masterpiece thrown away on Freddy.LIZA. You think I like you to say that. But I haven't forgot what you said a minute ago; and I won't be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I can't have kindness, I'll have independence.HIGGINS. Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.LIZA [rising determinedly] I'll let you see whether I'm dependent on you. If you can preach, I can teach. I'll go and be a teacher.HIGGINS. What'll you teach, in heaven's name?LIZA. What you taught me. I'll teach phonetics.HIGGINS. Ha! Ha! Ha!

~ George Bernard Shaw

Nobody could stand an eternity of Heaven.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Heaven is the most angelically dull place in all creation

~ George Bernard Shaw

Youth is wasted on the young.

~ George Bernard Shaw

I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

~ George Bernard Shaw

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

~ George Bernard Shaw

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

~ George Bernard Shaw

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

~ George Bernard Shaw

In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every financier a dictator, every private employer a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at their mercy, and no public responsibility. And to symbolize this state of things, this defeat of all government, you have set up in New York Harbour a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete this monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of Hell ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

~ George Bernard Shaw

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.

~ George Bernard Shaw

I never asked to be a king: it was pushed on me. So if you are going to say 'Son of St Louis: gird on the sword of your ancestors, and lead us to victory' you may spare your breath to cool your porridge; for I cannot do it. I am not built that way; and there is an end of it.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

~ George Bernard Shaw

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?

~ George Bernard Shaw

The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older.

~ George Bernard Shaw

To be in hell is to drift, to be in heaven is to steer.

~ George Bernard Shaw

HIGGINS. 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 were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

~ George Bernard Shaw