“The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.”
“You see things and you say, 'Why?'. But I dream things and I say, 'Why not?'.”
“My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.”
“What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.”
Source: The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Lectures, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
“Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.”
Source: George Bernard Shaw: The Collected Plays (Illustrated): 60 plays including Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, Saint Joan, The Apple Cart, Cymbeline, Androcles And The Lion, The Man Of Destiny, The Inca Of Perusalem and Macbeth Skit
“Morality consists of suspecting other people of not being legally married.”
Source: The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Lectures, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
“The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty . . . . Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys basic people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.”
Source: The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
“Hell is full of musical amateurs.”
“The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.”
“Music is the brandy of the damned.”
“Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.”
“If all the Churches of Europe closed their doors until the drums ceased rolling they would act as a most powerful reminder that though the glory of war is a famous and ancient glory, it is not the final glory of God.”
Source: George Bernard Shaw: Collected Articles, Lectures, Essays and Letters: Thoughts and Studies from the Renowned Dramaturge and Author of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Pygmalion, Arms and The Man, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion
“Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.”
Source: George Bernard Shaw: Collected Articles, Lectures, Essays and Letters: Thoughts and Studies from the Renowned Dramaturge and Author of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Pygmalion, Arms and The Man, Saint Joan, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion
“Cruelty must be whitewashed by a moral excuse, and pretense of reluctance.”
“In the Middle Ages people believed that the earth was flat, for which they had at least the evidence of their senses: we believe it to be round, not because as many as 1 percent of us could give physical reasons for so quaint a belief, but because modern science has convinced us that nothing that is obvious is true, and that everything that is magical, improbable, extraordinary, gigantic, microscopic, heartless, or outrageous is scientific.”
“I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like the state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.”
“Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.”
“New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths.”
“Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.”
Source: The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
“The greatest thing in life is to die young - but delay it as long as possible.”
“It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”
Source: The Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw (Illustrated): Including Renowned Titles like Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, The Inca Of Perusalem, Macbeth Skit, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion
“When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age, ask them how they would like to life in a stationary one, and do without change”
“It's a pity youth is wasted on the young.”
“Liberty is the breath of life to nations.”
Source: The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Lectures, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
“The only way in which a nation can make itself wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping: that is, by providing for its wants in the order of their importance, and allowing no money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until necessities have been thoroughly served.”
“If a group of beings from another planet were to land on Earth - beings who considered themselves as superior to you as you feel yourself to be to other animals - would you concede them the rights over you that you assume over other animals?”
“No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.”
“Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.”
“All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.”
Source: The Collected Plays of George Bernard Shaw (Illustrated): Including Renowned Titles like Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, The Inca Of Perusalem, Macbeth Skit, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion
“Experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn.”
Source: George Bernard Shaw: The Collected Plays (Illustrated): 60 plays including Caesar and Cleopatra, Pygmalion, Saint Joan, The Apple Cart, Cymbeline, Androcles And The Lion, The Man Of Destiny, The Inca Of Perusalem and Macbeth Skit
“Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.”
Source: The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Lectures, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
“I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler; I don't like beer.”
“Alcohol is a very necessary article. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.”
“Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from their riches. They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position; they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and do useful work. But this means that they do not live like rich people at all, and might therefore just as well have ordinary incomes.”
“Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.”
“The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.”
“The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.”
Source: The Portable Bernard Shaw
“What is both surprising and delightful is that the spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game...There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability.”
“Some people look at the world and say 'why?' Some people look at the world and say 'why not?'”
“A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.”
“Home is the girl's prison and the woman's workhouse.”
“We call the one side [of humanity] religion, and we call the other science. Religion is always right. ... Science is always wrong; it is the very artifice of men. Science can never solve one problem without raising ten more problems.”
Source: Einstein on Cosmic Religion and Other Opinions and Aphorisms
“The 100% American is 99% idiot.”
“I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.”
“There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.”
“Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.”
“I believe in the discipline of silence, and could talk for hours about it.”
“I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.”
Source: The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more
“I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.”
“I become more convinced that beings from other planets are using the Earth as a lunatic asylum”
