George Bernard Shaw

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
-- George Bernard Shaw

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

All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions.
--George Bernard Shaw

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.
--George Bernard Shaw

To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
-- George Bernard Shaw

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
--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

G. B. Shaw to William Douglas Home: Go on writing plays, my boy. One of these days a London producer will go into his office and say to his secretary, `Is there a play from Shaw this morning?' and when she says `No,' he will say, `Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish.' And that's your chance, my boy.
-- 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

I often quote myself; it adds spice to my conversation.
-- George Bernard Shaw

NAPOLEON: What shall we do with this soldier,
Guiseppe? Everything he says is wrong.
GUISEPPE: Make him a general, Excellency, and then everything he says will be right.
-- George Bernard Shaw, The Man of Destiny

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The seven deadly sins ... Food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability and children. Nothing can lift those seven milestones from man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the milestones are lifted.
-- George Bernard Shaw

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
-- George Bernard Shaw

When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.
-- George Bernard Shaw

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
-- George Bernard Shaw

A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.
-- George Bernard Shaw

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
--George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Lack of money is the root of all evil.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Martyrdom is the only way a person can become famous without ability.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

You see things and say 'Why?'; but I dream things that never were and I say 'Why not?'
-- George Bernard Shaw

There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.
-- George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.
-- George Bernard Shaw [1903]

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

I am not a teacher---only
a fellow traveler of whom you asked the way.
I pointed ahead---
ahead of myself
as well as of you.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever when they are only wasting their time.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
-- George Bernard Shaw

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.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Every man is a revolutionist concerning the thing he understands. For example, every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it, and consequently a revolutionist.
-- George Bernard Shaw

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Reviewing has one advantage over suicide: in suicide you take it out on yourself; in reviewing you take it out on other people.
-- George Bernard Shaw

She had lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Sherlock Holmes was a drug addict without a single amiable trait.
-- George Bernard Shaw

A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.
Man and Superman act 1, (1903)
-- George Bernard Shaw

A miracle, my friend, is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.
-- George Bernard Shaw

A strange lady giving an address in Zurich wrote him [Shaw] a proposal, thus: `You have the greatest brain in the world, and I have the most beautiful body; so we ought to produce the most perfect child.' Shaw asked: `What if the child inherits my body and your brains?'
-- George Bernard Shaw

Alcohol is a very necessary article. It makes life bearable to millions of people who could not endure their existence if they were quite sober. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Do not do unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Englishmen never will be slaves: they are free to do whatever the Government and public opinion allow them to do.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
-- George Bernard Shaw

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.
-- George Bernard Shaw

We must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Life does not cease to be funny when people die; any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
-- George Bernard Shaw

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It is the funniest joke in the world.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
-- George Bernard Shaw

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in the world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Nobel Prize money is a lifebelt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
-- George Bernard Shaw

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
-- George Bernard Shaw

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The liars punishment is, not in the least that he cannot be believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
-- George Bernard Shaw

If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
-- George Bernard Shaw

I want to sleep...
--George Bernard Shaw's last words

Gin was mother's milk to her.
-- George Bernard Shaw

HIGGINS: Doolittle, you're either an honest man or a rogue.
DOOLITTLE: A little of both, Guv'nor. Like the rest of us, a little
of both.
-- George Bernard Shaw

He who has never hoped can never despair.
-- George Bernard Shaw

I am a Millionaire. That is my religion.
-- George Bernard Shaw

I don't believe in morality. I am a disciple of Bernard Shaw.
-- George Bernard Shaw

I never resist temptation because I have found things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
-- George Bernard Shaw

How can what an Englishman believes be heresy? It is a contradiction in terms.
-- George Bernard Shaw

If parents would only realize how they bore their own children!
-- 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

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Is the devil to have all the passions as well as all the good tunes?
-- George Bernard Shaw

It's all the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.
-- George Bernard Shaw

MENDOZA: I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich.
TANNER: I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all the sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination?
-- George Bernard Shaw

My aunt died of influenza: so they said. But it's my belief they done the old woman in.
-- George Bernard Shaw

No eggs! No eggs!! Thousand thunders, man, what do you mean by no eggs?
-- George Bernard Shaw

Nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman.
-- George Bernard Shaw

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
-- George Bernard Shaw

PICKERING: Have you no morals, man?
DOOLITTLE: Can't afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was
as poor as me
-- George Bernard Shaw

SWINDON: What will history say?
BURGOYNE: History, sir, will tell lies as usual.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Take care to get what you like, or you will be forced to like what you get.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
-- George Bernard Shaw

The thought of two thousand people munching celery at the same time horrified me.
(Explaining why had turned down an invitation to a vegetarian gala dinner.)
-- George Bernard Shaw

They all thought she was dead; but my father he kept ladling gin down her throat till she came to so sudden that she bit the bowl of the spoon.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Vitality in a woman is a blind fury of creation. She sacrifices herself to it.
-- George Bernard Shaw

Well, sir, you never can tell. Thats a principle in life with me, sir. If youll excuse me having such a thing, sir.
-- George Bernard Shaw

What Englishmen will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?
-- George Bernard Shaw

When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
-- George Bernard Shaw