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George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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Famous George Bernard Shaw Quotes

“My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.”

“Happiness and Beauty are by-products.”

“Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.”

“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.”

“Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.”

“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.”

“Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification.”

“In a stupid nation the man of genius becomes a god : everybody worships him and nobody does his will.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Any sort of plain speaking is better than the nauseous sham good fellowship our democratic public men get up for shop use.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I know I began as a passion and have ended as a habit , like all husbands .”

“Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think.”

“I don't believe in morality . I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Conceive. That is the word that means both the beginning in imagination and the end in creation.”

“When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.”

“Those who understand evil pardon it.”

“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.”