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Home / Books / 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 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

Book by George Bernard Shaw · 30 quotes · Men, Ifs, Knows

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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 Quotes

“The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.”

“A love affair should always be a honeymoon. And the only way to make sure of that is to keep changing the man; for the same man can never keep it up.”

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

“No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.”

“Most married couples spend the whole day apart, the woman in the house, the man in the office or study or workshop.”

“I must remind you that our credulity is not to be measured by the truth of the things we believe. When men believed that the earthwas flat, they were not credulous: they were using their common sense, and, if asked to prove that the earth was flat, would have said simply, "Look at it." Those who refuse to believe that it is round are exercising a wholesome skepticism.”

“Only in the problem play is there any real drama, because drama is no mere setting up of the camera to nature: it is the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem.”

“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.”

“It is very doubtful whether man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious and efficient constitution. All the evidence is against it.”

“The righteous man takes his life in his hand whenever he utters the truth.”

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

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

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

“Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.”

“It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.”

“In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.”

“I like a bit of mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog.”

“The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.”

“You know well I couldn't bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it's wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could.”

“Life is a disease; and the only difference between on man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.”

“No man manages his affairs as well as a tree does”

“If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.”

“Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.”

“Has fear ever held a man back from anything he really wanted?”

“No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.”

“The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.”

“Every man to whom salvation is offered has an inalienable natural right to say 'No, thank you: I prefer to retain my full moral responsibility: it is not good for me to be able to load a scapegoat with my sins: I should be less careful how I committed them if I knew they would cost me nothing.”

“When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.”

“There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.”

“What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.”