George Bernard Shaw

I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten.

— George Bernard Shaw

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

— George Bernard Shaw

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.

— George Bernard Shaw

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

— George Bernard Shaw

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.

— George Bernard Shaw

Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.

— George Bernard Shaw

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

— George Bernard Shaw

Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.

— George Bernard Shaw

Science is always wrong, it never solves a problem without creating ten more.

— George Bernard Shaw

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

— George Bernard Shaw

It is easy -- terribly easy -- to shake a man's faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man's spirit is devil's work.

— George Bernard Shaw

A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most. On Other Peoples Expectations: The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.

— George Bernard Shaw

Self-denial is not a virtue, it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

— George Bernard Shaw

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

— George Bernard Shaw

Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

— George Bernard Shaw

We live in an atmosphere of shame. We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins.

— George Bernard Shaw

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

— George Bernard Shaw

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

— George Bernard Shaw

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

— George Bernard Shaw

When Satan makes impure verses, Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them.

— George Bernard Shaw

We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.

— George Bernard Shaw

I don't want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

— George Bernard Shaw

Success covers a multitude of blunders.

— George Bernard Shaw

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

— George Bernard Shaw

A man of great common sense and good taste -- meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

— George Bernard Shaw

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.

— George Bernard Shaw

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

— George Bernard Shaw

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

— George Bernard Shaw

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

— George Bernard Shaw

Few people think more than two or three times a year. I have made an international reputation for myself thinking once or twice a week.

— George Bernard Shaw

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.

— George Bernard Shaw

No king on earth is as safe in his job as a Trade Union official. There is only one thing that can get him sacked; and that is drink. Not even that, as long as he doesn't actually fall down.

— George Bernard Shaw

There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart's desire. The other is to get it.

— George Bernard Shaw

Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air. It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability.

— George Bernard Shaw

Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.

— George Bernard Shaw

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

— George Bernard Shaw

A man who has no office to go to -- I don't care who he is -- is a trial of which you can have no conception.

— George Bernard Shaw

The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.

— George Bernard Shaw

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

— George Bernard Shaw

When it comes to the point, really bad men are just as rare as really good ones.

— George Bernard Shaw

If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.

— George Bernard Shaw

Better keep yourself clean and bright. You are the window through which you must see the world.

— George Bernard Shaw

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

— George Bernard Shaw

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

— George Bernard Shaw

Some men see things as they are and say, Why? I of dream things that never were, and say, Why not?

— George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

— George Bernard Shaw

In the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence, and famine.

— George Bernard Shaw

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

— George Bernard Shaw

This comes of James teaching me to think for myself, and never to hold back out of fear of what other people may think of me. It works beautifully as long as I think the same things as he does.

— George Bernard Shaw

The only way for a woman to provide for herself decently is for her to be good to some man that can afford to be good to her.

— George Bernard Shaw

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.

— George Bernard Shaw

When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn't want to be a failure, so I did ten times more work.

— George Bernard Shaw

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

— George Bernard Shaw

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

— George Bernard Shaw

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

— George Bernard Shaw

It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

— George Bernard Shaw

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

— George Bernard Shaw

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

— George Bernard Shaw

The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.

— George Bernard Shaw

You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.

— George Bernard Shaw

You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell: All hope abandon ye who enter here.

— George Bernard Shaw

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

— George Bernard Shaw

You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?

— George Bernard Shaw

Majesty: when a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.

— George Bernard Shaw

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find an Englishman doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.

— George Bernard Shaw

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

— George Bernard Shaw

The fact that a believer is happier than a sceptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.

— George Bernard Shaw

I have nothing to offer you but my strength for your defence, my honesty for your surety, my ability and industry for your livelihood, and my authority and position for your dignity. That is all it becomes a man to offer to a woman.

— George Bernard Shaw

All young women begin by believing they can change and reform the men they marry. They can't.

— George Bernard Shaw

Do not mistake your objection to defeat for an objection to fighting, your objection to being a slave for an objection to slavery, your objection to not being as rich as your neighbor for an objection to poverty. The cowardly, the insubordinate, and the envious share your objections.

— George Bernard Shaw

Instruction in sex is as important as instruction in food; yet not only are our adolescents not taught the physiology of sex, but never warned that the strongest sexual attraction may exist between persons so incompatible in tastes and capacities that they could not endure living together for a week much less a lifetime.

— George Bernard Shaw

Every man over 40 is a scoundrel.

— George Bernard Shaw

A doctor’s reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.

— George Bernard Shaw

Vegetarians claim to be immune from most diseases but they have been known to die from time to time.

— George Bernard Shaw

Those who try to make life one long holiday find that they need a holiday from that too.

— George Bernard Shaw

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.

— George Bernard Shaw