Top 150 George Bernard Shaw Quotes

A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.

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

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

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

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.

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.

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

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

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

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

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

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

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.

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

Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

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

Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.

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

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.

I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

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.

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

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

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.

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

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

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

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

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

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

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.

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

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

The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

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

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

Property is organized robbery.

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 man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

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

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

Most people do not pray; they only beg.

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.

It is most unwise for people in love to marry.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

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

A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

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.

You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’

Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.

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

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

I want to be all used up when I die.

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

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.

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

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.

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.

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

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.

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.

I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.

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

Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.

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

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.

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

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.

General consultant to mankind.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

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

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

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.

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

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.