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George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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Famous George Bernard Shaw Quotes

“Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.”

“In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it's more dangerous to lose than to win.”

“Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.”

“Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.”

“Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.”

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

“Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.”

“Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice”

“Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.”

“Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.”

“Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.”

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

“The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.”

“You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.”

“A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.”

“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.”

“No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.”

“The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.”

“Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.”

“Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.”

“Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.”

“Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.”

“If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.”