George Bernard Shaw's Quotes

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 perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

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

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

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

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

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.

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

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

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

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

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.

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

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

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

Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.

A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

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

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

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

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

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.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

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

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

Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

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

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

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.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

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

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

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

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

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.

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

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

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

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

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

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

Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.

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

It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.

Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.

The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

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

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

Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.