Quotes by Shaw, George Bernard

"I'm not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead -- ahead of myself as well as you."

Shaw, George Bernard on advice
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"If you value a man's regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper -- and despise it."

Shaw, George Bernard on affection   

"Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing --a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces."

Shaw, George Bernard on death
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"I want to be all used up when I die."

Shaw, George Bernard on death
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"Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent."

Shaw, George Bernard on death   

"The government who robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."

Shaw, George Bernard on debt
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"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."

Shaw, George Bernard on democracy
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"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."

Shaw, George Bernard on democracy   

"Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless."

Shaw, George Bernard on desire
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"As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death."

Shaw, George Bernard on action
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"The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them."

Shaw, George Bernard on doctors   

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"Every doctor will allow a colleague to decimate a whole countryside sooner than violate the bond of professional etiquette by giving him away."

Shaw, George Bernard on doctors   

"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."

Shaw, George Bernard on duty
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"If all the economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."

Shaw, George Bernard on economy and economics
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"What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real."

Shaw, George Bernard on education   

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"An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it."

Shaw, George Bernard on elections   

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"Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men."

Shaw, George Bernard on elections   

"Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality."

Shaw, George Bernard on equality   

"I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."

Shaw, George Bernard on evil   

"Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else."

Shaw, George Bernard on exaggeration   

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

Shaw, George Bernard on example   

"Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience."

Shaw, George Bernard on experience
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"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!"

Shaw, George Bernard on experience   

"Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough."

Shaw, George Bernard on experience   

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

Shaw, George Bernard on experts   

"We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession."

Shaw, George Bernard on faith   

"He didn't dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life."

Shaw, George Bernard on family   

"When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them. But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices."

Shaw, George Bernard on family   

"Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics."

Shaw, George Bernard on fashion   

"My father must have had some elementary education for he could read and write and keep accounts inaccurately"

Shaw, George Bernard on fathers   

"A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out."

Shaw, George Bernard on fellowship
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"That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms."

Shaw, George Bernard on fights and fighting   

"What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering."

Shaw, George Bernard on flattery   

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"There is no love sincerer than the love of food."

Shaw, George Bernard on food and eating
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"Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it."

Shaw, George Bernard on fools and foolishness   

"The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing."

Shaw, George Bernard on forgiveness
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"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!"

Shaw, George Bernard on forgiveness
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"The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself."

Shaw, George Bernard on friends and friendship
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"But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth."

Shaw, George Bernard on friends and friendship   

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"We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future."

Shaw, George Bernard on the future