George Bernard Shaw
music critic, politician, playwright, linguist, screenwriter, journalist, biographer, photographer, writer, essayist, prose writer, socialist, literary critic, theatre critic, pacifist, Nobel Prize winner
Read on Wikipedia1856 – 1950
All Quotes by George Bernard Shaw
“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”
“It is most unwise for people in love to marry.”
“THE HE-ANCIENT: When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truthSTREPHON: Yes; and take all the fun out of it.”
“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.”
“The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.”
“Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.”
“Art is the magic mirror you make to reflect your invisible dreams in visible pictures. You use a glass mirror to see your face: you use works of art to see your soul. But we who are older use neither glass mirrors nor works of art. We have a direct sense of life. When you gain that you will put aside your mirrors and statues, your toys and your dolls.”
“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.”
“The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.”
“All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.”
“When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.”
“We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.”
“Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.”
“Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.”
“The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.”
“The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.”
“Even a vortex is a vortex in something. You can't have a whirlpool without water; and you can't have a vortex without gas, or molecules or atoms or ions or electrons or something, not nothing.”
“Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”
“While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth?”
“The body was the slave of the vortex; but the slave has become the master; and we must free ourselves from that tyranny. It is this stuff [indicating her body], this flesh and blood and bone and all the rest of it, that is intolerable. Even prehistoric man dreamed of what he called an astral body, and asked who would deliver him from the body of this death.”
“Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.”
“The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.”
“I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough.”
“Hell is full of musical amateurs.”
“Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.”
“They have accepted the burden of eternal life. They have taken the agony from birth; and their life does not fail them even in the hour of their destruction.”
“No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.”
“There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.”
“I had patience with them for many ages: they tried me very sorely. They did terrible things: they embraced death, and said that eternal life was a fable. I stood amazed at the malice and destructiveness of the things I had made...”
“Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”
“Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.”
“They have redeemed themselves from their vileness, and turned away from their sins. Best of all, they are still not satisfied: the impulse I gave them in that day when I sundered myself in twain and launched Man and Woman on the earth still urges them: after passing a million goals they press on to the goal of redemption from the flesh, to the vortex freed from matter, to the whirlpool in pure intelligence that, when the world began, was a whirlpool in pure force.”
“Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.”
“An index is a great leveller.”
“I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.”
“The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.”
“Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.”
“No public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.”
“The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.”
“The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.”
“A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.”
“I have defined the 100 per cent American as 99 per cent an idiot.”
“A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.”
“My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion.”
“I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly tell our children that honesty is the best policy.”
“We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”
“If a woman can, by careful selection of a father and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it.”
“As a red hot Communist I am in favour of fascism. The only drawback to Sir Oswald’s movement is that it is not quite British enough.”
“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”
“Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.”
“An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means. There is no such thing in the country.”
“Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.”
“Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.”
“Very few people can afford to be poor.”
“You in America should trust to that volcanic political instinct which I have divined in you.”
“There is no sincerer love than the love of food.”
“No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.”
“Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”
“There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates, who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.”
“A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.”
“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.”
“All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.”
“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”
“An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.”
“The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation.”
“We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”
“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”
“Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.”
“The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.”
“Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.”
“A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.”
“A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
“Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.”
“What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?”
“We have no reason to suppose that we are the Creator's last word.”
“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.”
“What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?”
“The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.”
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”
“A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.”
“The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people.”
“The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.”
“A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.”
“Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.”
“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.”
“Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.”
“Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.”
“The first prison I ever saw had inscribed on it CEASE TO DO EVIL: LEARN TO DO WELL; but as the inscription was on the outside, the prisoners could not read it.”
“If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.”
“Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.”
“Vulgarity is a necessary part of a complete author's equipment; and the clown is sometimes the best part of the circus.”
“It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.”
“If I were a woman, I'd simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I'd got the vote.”
“Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.”
“The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.”
“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
“A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation - or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays - is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.”
“I know I began as a passion and have ended as a habit, like all husbands.”
“Every man over forty is a scoundrel.”
“A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.”
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
“Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. Creeds, articles, and institutes of religious faith ossify our brains and make change impossible. As such they are nuisances, and in practice have to be mostly ignored.”
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
“Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”
“We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.”
“You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'”
“Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.”
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
“Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.”
“Youth is wasted on the young.”
“Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”
“Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.”
“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”
“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”
“Lack of money is the root of all evil.”
“Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.”
“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.”
“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
“Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”
“Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.”
“Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.”
“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
“Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.”
“What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?”
“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”
“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
“He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.”
“Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.”
“Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.”
“He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.”
“No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.”
“You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.”
“It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.”
“Better never than late.”
“Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.”
“There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.”
“I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.”
“Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.”
“The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.”
“The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.”
“The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.”
“Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.”
“You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.”
“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.”
“Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it…”
“The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.”
“Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it…”
“Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.”
“But no public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means; and I have no reason to hope that Mr Coote may be an exception to the rule.”
“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.”
“My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.”
“There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.”
“Socialists must be in favor of an aristocratic form of government. We must have the best men for the job . . . In the dictator you must have a man who has not only the power to govern but the force of character to impose himself as dictator whether you like him or not.”
“Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.”
“We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.”
“The truth sticks in our throats with all the sauces it is served with: it will never go down until we take it without any sauce at all.”
“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.”
“I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer.”
“People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.”
“We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.”
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
“Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.”
“The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.”
“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”
“Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?”
“My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.”
“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
“The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.”
“I had not achieved a success; but I provoked an uproar; and the sensation was so agreeable that I resolved to try again.”
“I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.”
“There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.”
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”
“Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.”
“Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.”
“You're not a man, you're a machine.”
“The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.”
“Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that. Why should I be filthy and inhuman? Why should I be an accomplice in the wholesale horror and degradation of the slaughter-house?”
“Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.”
“Just as the liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.”
“We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”
“Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”
“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
“The salvation of the world depends on the men who will not take evil good-humouredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him.”
“Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.”
“It's well to be off with the Old Woman before you're on with the New.”
“The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.”
“The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.”
“I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.”
“The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.”
“The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.”
“Very few people can afford to be poor.”
“People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.”
“We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.”
“There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.”
“The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.”
“I know Miss Warren is a great devotee of the Gospel of Getting On.”
“An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.”
“Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar! I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day's deed, and think my night's thought.”
“The love of economy is the root of all virtue.”
“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”
“My way hither was the way of destiny; for I am he of whose genius you are the symbol: part brute, part woman, and part God — nothing of man in me at all. Have I read your riddle, Sphinx?”
“That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them”
“The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.”
“When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.”
“I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.”
“The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.”
“Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.”
“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.”
“Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.”
“Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.”
“First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.”
“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
“I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.”
“When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.”
“You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.”
“The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.”
“[Chess] is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time.”
“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.”
“To understand a saint, you must hear the devil's advocate; and the same is true of the artist.”
“Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.”
“Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.”
“Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.”
“The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud.”
“Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.”
“The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.”
“You cannot be a hero without being a coward.”
“Youth is wasted on the young.”
“There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.”
“Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”
“All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense.”
“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.”
“If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling. Corrupt successes, disgraceful failures, or sheeplike vegetation are all it has to offer. I prefer Art, which gives me a sixth sense of beauty, with self-respect: perhaps also an immortal reputation in return for honest endeavour in a labour of love.”
“It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.”
“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”
“Perhaps woman's art is of woman's life a thing apart, 'tis man's whole existence; just as love is said to be the reverse — though it isn't.”
“In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.”
“I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats.”
“Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.”
“A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.”
“We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.”
“Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family.”
“The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.”
“Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.”
“Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.”
“Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.”
“We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.”
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
“I want to be all used up when I die.”
“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”
“The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.”
“The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.”
“The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”
“The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.”
“Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.”
“Economy is the art of making the most of life. The love of economy is the root of all virtue.”
“A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.”
“Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.”
“I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.”
“If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.”
“Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”
“He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.”
“There is no sincerer love than the love of food.”
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”
“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.”
“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
“The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.”
“Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.”
“A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.”
“The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.”
“Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.”
“No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.”
“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.”
“The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.”
“What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.”
“Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.”
“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.”
“When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.”
“It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.”
“There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.”
“Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.”
“We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.”
“Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.”
“Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.”
“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.”
“Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.”
“Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.”
“I hear you say 'Why?' Always 'Why?' You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”
“Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.”
“One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.”
“In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god: everybody worships him and nobody does his will.”
“Happiness and Beauty are by-products.”
“Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty.”
“My reputation grows with every failure.”
“He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.”
“The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.”
“The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.”
“In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.”
“No elaboration of physical or moral accomplishment can atone for the sin of parasitism.”
“The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.”
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
“Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.”
“Decency is Indecency’s Conspiracy of Silence.”
“Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience. If we could learn from mere experience, the stones of London would be wiser than its wisest men.”
“No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare.”
“The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.”
“The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.”
“Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.”
“Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections.”
“Those who understand evil pardon it.”
“There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.”
“When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of “Orthodoxy, True and False” and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.”
“If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.”
“Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.”
“I exclude the hypothesis of complete originality on [Charles] Lever's part, because a man can no more be completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of air.”
“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”
“The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.”
“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.”
“The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.”
“It is quite useless to declare that all men are born free if you deny that they are born good. Guarantee a man's goodness and his liberty will take care of itself. To guarantee his freedom on condition that you approve of his moral character is formally to abolish all freedom whatsoever, as every man's liberty is at the mercy of a moral indictment which any fool can trump up against everyone who violates custom, whether as a prophet or as a rascal.”
“Syllables govern the world.”
“I can't talk religion to a man with bodily hunger in his eyes.”
“You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”
“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.”
“Undershaft: My religion? Well, my dear, I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.”
“A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.”
“You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.”
“It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income. … What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles?”
“Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”
“He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.”
“You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”
“A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.”
“You cannot be a hero without being a coward.”
“Lack of money is the root of all evil.”
“What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.”
“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
“My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.”
“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.”
“When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.”
“Home life as we understand it is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.”
“When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”
“Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.”
“Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification.”
“Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or religion.”
“Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.”
“A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.”
“The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.”
“All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.”
“Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think.”
“Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.”
“All progress means war with Society.”
“Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.”
“The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.”
“Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.”
“You don't learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.”
“General consultant to mankind.”
“Why was I born with such contemporaries?”
“Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.”
“A critic recently described me, with deadly acuteness, as having 'a kindly dislike of my fellow-creatures.' Perhaps dread would have been nearer the mark than dislike; for man is the only animal of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.”
“The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.”
“The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.”
“If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.”
“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
“That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.”
“Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.”
“As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.”
“The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.”
“Well, I tell you again to get rid of your Constitution. But I suppose you won't do it. You have a good president and you have a bad Constitution, and the bad Constitution gets the better of the good President all the time. The end of it will be is that you might as well have an English Prime Minister.”
“Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.”
“Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity; and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.”
“The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.”
“All great truths begin as blasphemies.”
“Virtue is insufficient temptation.”
“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.”
“The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.”
“Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.”
“You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.”
“When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.”
“It is more dangerous to be a great prophet or poet than to promote twenty companies for swindling simple folk out of their savings.”
“If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.”
“Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.”
“You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.”
“I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.”
“A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of Hell.”
“I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.”
“I like a bit of a mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog; they're the best for every day.”
“I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.”
“If parents would only realize how they bore their children!”
“Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.”
“An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.”
“When will we realize that the fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.”
“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.”
“Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.”
“Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.”
“The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation, because occupation means pre-occupation; and the pre-occupied person is neither happy nor unhappy, but simply alive and active, which is pleasanter than any happiness until you are tired of it.”
“When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.”
“She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.”
“Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.”
“Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.”
“Every man over forty is a scoundrel.”
“No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it well, ever loses his self-respect.”
“There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.”
“Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
“She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.”
“All professions are conspiracies against the laity.”
“I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.”
“I don't believe in morality. I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw.”
“My reputation grows with every failure.”
“Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.”
“I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.”
“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”
“If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.”
“Chloroform has done a lot of mischief. It's enabled every fool to be a surgeon.”
“Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.”
“It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”
“Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.”
“The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.”
“There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.”
“He ain't a copper just look at 'is boots!”
“Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.”
“Ah-ah-ah-ah-ow-ow-oo-oo!!! I ain't dirty: I washed me face and hands afore I come, I did!”
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.”
“Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.”
“In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.”
“What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day.”
“Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.”
“I wouldn't have ate it, only I'm too lady-like to take it out of my mouth.”
“If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.”
“I don't want to talk grammar, I want to talk like a lady.”
“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.”
“I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor: thats what I am. Think of what that means to a man.”
“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!”
“I aint such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself.”
“Syllables govern the world.”
“I heard your prayers Thank God it's all over!”
“In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.”
“You see, lots of the real people can't do it at all: they're such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. There's always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.”
“I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.”
“Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.”
“What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.”
“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”
“I have to live for others and not for myself; that's middle-class morality.”
“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”
“Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.”
“Independence? That's middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.”
“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.”
“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality of happiness, and by no means a necessity of life.”
“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.”
“There is no sincerer love than the love of food.”
“Revolutionary movements attract those who are not good enough for established institutions as well as those who are too good for them.”
“The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.”
“Howbeit, Paul succeeded in stealing the image of Christ crucified for the figure-head of his Salvationist vessel, with its Adam posing as the natural man, its doctrine of original sin, and its damnation avoidable only by faith in the sacrifice of the cross. In fact, no sooner had Jesus knocked over the dragon of superstition than Paul boldly set it on its legs again in the name of Jesus.”
“Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.”
“The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.”
“Therefore my tax-payer, resign yourself to this: that we may fight bravely, fight hard, fight long, fight cunningly, fight recklessly, fight in a hundred and fifty ways, but we cannot fight cheaply.”
“Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.”
“He must be greatly changed. Has he attained the seventh degree of concentration?”
“Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.”
“Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”
“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.”
“Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.”
“When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”
“Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.”
“Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.”
“Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.”
“Political necessities sometimes turn out to be political mistakes.”
“Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.”
“If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.”
“Scratch an Englishman and find a Protestant.”
“Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.”
“Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.”
“God is on the side of the big battalions.”
“A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.”
“We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.”
“Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?”
“Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. 'A miracle a minute' would not be a bad slogan for God.”
“The Italians must allow us to slaughter the Momands, because, if we do not kill the warlike hillmen, they will kill us. And we must allow the Italians to slaughter the Danakils for the same reason.”
“Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.”
“It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.”
“A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.”
“Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.”
“The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy.”
“Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.”
“Some of the things Mussolini has done, and some that he is threatening to do go further in the direction of Socialism than the English Labour Party could yet venture if they were in power.”
“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.”
“I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for - scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself.”
“Our natural dispositions may be good; but we have been badly brought up, and are full of anti-social personal ambitions and prejudices and snobberies. Had we not better teach our children to be better citizens than ourselves? We are not doing that at present. The Russians are. That is my last word. Think over it.”
“Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.”
“The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.”
“One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.”
“England and America are two countries separated by the same language.”
“God help England if she had no Scots to think for her!”
“There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.”
“Under Socialism, you would not be allowed to be poor. You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you liked it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner; but whilst you were permitted to live, you would have to live well.”
“It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.”
“Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family. But here again, because there is nothing to sell, there is a very general disposition to regard a married woman's work as no work at all, and to take it as a matter of course that she should not be paid for it.”
“If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.”
“Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.”
“One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.”
“Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
“Well, of course, they notice you. You always hide just in the middle of the limelight.”
“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.”
“We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.”
“In truth, mankind cannot be saved from without, by schoolmasters or any other sort of masters: it can only be lamed and enslaved by them. It is said that if you wash a cat it will never again wash itself. This may or may not be true: what is certain is that if you teach a man anything he will never learn it; and if you cure him of a disease he will be unable to cure himself the next time it attacks him.”
“Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.”
“I hear you say "Why?" Always "Why?" You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"”
“It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.”
“I worship you, Eve. I must have something to worship. Something quite different to myself, like you. There must be something greater than the snake.”
“Most people do not pray; they only beg.”
“Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.”
“First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.”
“I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.”
“Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.”
“Property is organized robbery.”
“Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing.”
“Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.”
“I am very subtle; but Man is deeper in his thought than I am. The woman knows that there is no such thing as nothing: the man knows that there is no such day as tomorrow. I do well to worship them.”
“What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.”
“Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.”
“I make no vows. I take my chance. … It means that I fear certainty as you fear uncertainty. It means that nothing is certain but uncertainty. If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.”
“Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.”
“You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.”
“The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.”
“Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?”
“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.”
“Your father is a fool skin deep; but you are a fool to your very marrow.”
“Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
“The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.”
“Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.”
“A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”
“I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.”
“There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.”
“Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.”
“What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.”
“Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.”
“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”
“Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!”
“Silence is the perfect expression of scorn.”
“You may remember that on earth—though of course we never confessed it—the death of anyone we knew, even those we liked best, was always mingled with a certain satisfaction at being finally done with them.”
“You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”
“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.”
“The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.”
“The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.”
“The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.”
“Life is not meant to be easy, my child but take courage: it can be delightful.”