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George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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Famous George Bernard Shaw Quotes

“If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.”

“Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him. Even if I did not, I should pretend to; for a taste in his music is a mark of caste among musicians, and should be worn, like a tall hat, by the amateur who wishes to pass for a true Brahmin.”

“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.”

“I really don't think I could consent to go to Heaven if I thought there were no animals there.”

“If you cannot attain knowledge without torturing a dog, you must do without knowledge.”

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”

“If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”

“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.”

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

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

“You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.”

“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.”

“The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.”

“Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?”

“Oh, well, if you want original conversations, you'd better go and talk to yourself.”

“If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.”

“HIGGINS. Have you no morals, man? DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Cant afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me.”

“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.”

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

“I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today. ... I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much-needed peace and happiness.”

“If you lived in London, where the whole system is one of false good-fellowship, and you may know a man for twenty years without finding out that he hates you like poison, you would soon have your eyes opened. There we do unkind things in a kind way: we say bitter things in a sweet voice: we always give our friends chloroform when we tear them to pieces.”

“If parents would only realize how they bore their children.”

“If I bind the future I bind my will. If I bind my will I strangle creation.”

“If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.”

“Our way of getting an army able to fight the German army is to declare war on Germany just as if we had such an army, and then trust to the appalling resultant peril and disaster to drive us into wholesale enlistment.”

“The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it ... If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?”