Quotessence
Home / Books / 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

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

Book by George Bernard Shaw · 46 quotes · Ifs, People, Heaven

Filter quotes by topic

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 Quotes

“Our laws make law impossible; our liberties destroy all freedom; our property is organized robbery; our morality an impudent hypocrisy; our wisdom is administered by inexperienced or mal-experienced dupes; our power wielded by cowards and weaklings; and our honour false in all its points. I am an enemy of the existing order for good reasons”

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

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

“Your heart and your mouth wil be in two separate parts of your body if you again forget in whose presence you stand.”

“That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it's horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.”

“Your wits can't thicken in that soft moist air, on those white springy roads, in those misty rushes and brown bogs, on those hillsides of granite rocks and magenta heather. You've no such colours in the sky, no such lure in the distances, no such sadness in the evenings. Oh the dreaming! the dreaming! the torturing, heart-scalding, never satisfying dreaming, dreaming, dreaming, dreaming!”

“Freedom, my good girl, means being able to count on how other people will behave.”

“It is a monstrous thing to force a child to learn Latin or Greek or mathematics on the ground that they are an indispensable gymnastic for the mental powers. It would be monstrous even if it were true.”

“No child should be brought up to suppose that its food and clothes come down from heaven or are miraculously conjured from empty space by papa. Loathsome as we have made the idea of duty (like the idea of work) we must habituate children to a sense of repayable obligation to the community for what they consume and enjoy, and inculcate the repayment as a point of honor.”

“If there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It's in the nature of governments to tell lies.”

“But a mother is like a broomstick or like the sun in the heavens, it does not matter which as far as one's knowledge of her is concerned: the broomstick is there and the sun is there; and whether the child is beaten by it or warmed and enlightened by it, it accepts it as a fact in nature, and does not conceive it as having had youth, passions, and weaknesses, or as still growing, yearning, suffering, and learning.”

“In a living society every day is a day of judgment; and its recognition as such is not the end of all things but the beginning ofa real civilization.”

“You don't get tired of muffins, but you don't find inspiration in them.”

“Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment.”

“To a professional critic (I have been one myself) theatre-going is the curse of Adam. The play is the evil he is paid to endure in the sweat of his brow; and the sooner it is over, the better.”

“If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.”

“Ye poor posterity, think not that ye are the first. Other fools before ye have seen the sun rise and set, and the moon change her shape and her hour. As they were so ye are; and yet not so great; for the pyramids my people built stand to this day; whilst the dustheaps on which ye slave, and which ye call empires, scatter in the wind even as ye pile your dead sons' bodies on them to make yet more dust.”

“You have nothing to do but mention the quantum theory, and people will take your voice for the voice of science, and belive anything.”

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

“For four wicked centuries the world has dreamed this foolish dream of efficiency; and the end is not yet. But the end will come.”

“I have my own soul. My own spark of divine fire.”

“The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.”

“Get out of my way; for I won't stop for you.”

“Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.”

“Experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn.”

“Men trifle with their business and their politics but never trifle with their games. It brings truth home to them. They cannot pretend they have won when they have lost nor that they had a magnificent drive when they foozled it. The Englishman is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.”

“If you go to Heaven without being naturally qualified for it you will not enjoy yourself there.”

“There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.”

“Nothing remains beautiful and interesting except thought, because the thought is the life.”

“Imagination is the beginning of creation.”

“The notion that persons should be safe from extermination as long as they do not commit willful murder, or levy war against the Crown, or kidnap, or throw vitriol, is not only to limit social responsibility unnecessarily, and to privilege the large range of intolerable misconduct that lies outside them, but to divert attention from the essential justification for extermination, which is always incorrigible social incompatibility and nothing else.”

“I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That's right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That's democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.”

“The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.”

“The British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding.”

“It is not disbelief that is dangerous to our society; it is belief.”

“This is my father. Try what you can with him! He won't listen to me, because he remembers what a fool I was when I was a baby.”

“All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.”

“The real moment of success is not the moment apparent to the crowd.”

“We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!”

“Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance.”

“We mustn't be stiff and stand-off, you know. We must be thoroughly democratic, and patronize everybody without distinction of class.”

“All great art and literature is propaganda.”

“It is long and hard and painful to create life: it is short and easy to steal the life others have made.”

“Marriage is tolerable enough in its way if youre easygoing and dont expect too much from it. But it doesnt bear thinking about.”

“God help England if she had no Scots to think for her.”