George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
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The minorities are sometimes right. The majorities never.
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You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter;but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!
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The statesman cannot govern without stability of belief, true or false.
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Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
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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.
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There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
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A man who loses his money gains, at the least, experience, and sometimes, something better.
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It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.
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No severity of punishment deters when detection is uncertain, as it always must be.
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You will think less of the art, when you know the artist
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A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
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Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!
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You may well ask me why...I took the time to write [books]. I can only reply that I do not know. There was no why about it. I had to: that was all.
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The popular definition of tragedy is heavy drama in which everyone is killed in the last act, comedy being light drama in which everyone is married in the last act.
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Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
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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...
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The test to which all methods of treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to doctors or not.
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There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
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I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.
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Time enough to think of the future when you haven't any future to think of.
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Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.
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It is the inefficiency and sham of ... our schools ... that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine instead of drifting down the midstream of mere ignorance.
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But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.
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For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.
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The sex illusion is not a fixed quantity: not what mathematicians call a constant. It varies from zero in my wife's case to madness in that of our stepsister.
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I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve.
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Nowadays a parlor maid as ignorant as Queen Victoria was when she came to the throne would be classed as mentally defective.
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Financiers live in a world of illusion. They count on something which they call the capital of the country, which has no existence.
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If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all.
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