George Bernard Shaw Quotes

The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy, and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.

~ George Bernard Shaw

All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

~ George Bernard Shaw

A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

~ George Bernard Shaw

[Man] progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

~ George Bernard Shaw

If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses.

~ George Bernard Shaw

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

~ George Bernard Shaw

I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blashphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and any one who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.

~ George Bernard Shaw

How can she? She's incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

~ George Bernard Shaw

You don't stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.

~ George Bernard Shaw

And if I am further pressed to declare straightforwardly whether I mean to disparage these authorities [who criticize Ibsen], I reply, pointedly, that I do. I affirm that such criticisms are written by men who know as much of political life as I know of navigation. (P. 56)

~ George Bernard Shaw

You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one. You might as well expect it to have fingers and toes because you do.

~ George Bernard Shaw

It is easy-terribly easy-to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to to break a man's spirit is Devil's work.

~ George Bernard Shaw

My dear: in this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Loyalty in a critic is corruption.

~ George Bernard Shaw

I have defined the hundred per cent American as ninety-nine per cent an idiot.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car.

~ George Bernard Shaw

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.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Some donkeys have amazing luck.

~ George Bernard Shaw

A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Well, I've known over thirty men who've found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment I suppose!

~ George Bernard Shaw

But I cant stand saying one thing when everyone knows I mean another. Whats the use in such hypocrisy? If people arrange the world that way for women, theres no good pretending it’s arranged the other way...

~ George Bernard Shaw

CHARTERIS [unfolding his arms in terror] No, please. Dont. As a philosopher, it’s my business to tell other people the truth; but it’s not their business to tell it to me. I dont like it: it hurts.

~ George Bernard Shaw

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Liquor is the chloroform which enables the poor man to endure the painful operation of living.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The solid earth sways like the treacherous sea beneath the feet of men and spirits alike when the innocent are slain in the name of law, and their wrongs are undone by slandering the pure of heart.

~ George Bernard Shaw

People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

~ George Bernard Shaw

My opportunities were still there nay they multiplied tenfold but the strength and youth to cope with them began to fail and to need eking out with the shifty cunning of experience.

~ George Bernard Shaw

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

~ George Bernard Shaw

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

~ George Bernard Shaw

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

~ George Bernard Shaw

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

~ George Bernard Shaw

You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard but by attacking and getting well hammered yourself.

~ George Bernard Shaw

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

~ George Bernard Shaw

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

~ George Bernard Shaw

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.

~ George Bernard Shaw

In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

~ George Bernard Shaw