George Bernard Shaw quotes:

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

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

Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.

Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider!

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

The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

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

Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.

You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

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.

Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.

The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

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

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.

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.

If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it.

Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population.

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

Youth is wasted on the young.

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

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

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

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

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.

Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.

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.

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

Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.

Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.

My reputation grows with every failure.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

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

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.

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

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

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

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

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for - scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself.

Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.

Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.

It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.

A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation - or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays - is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.

Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. 'A miracle a minute' would not be a bad slogan for God.

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

My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion.

All classes in proportion to their lack of travel and familiarity with foreign literature are bellicose, prejudiced against foreigners, fond of fighting as a cruel sport -- in short, dog-like in their notions of foreign policy.[Quoted in Socialism and Foreign Policy and War and the Liberal Conscience]

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.

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.

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man'sto keep unmarried as long as he can.

If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all.

It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.

Tanner: My dear Tavy, your pious English habit of regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your character in leads you to think about your own confounded principles when you should be thinking about other people's necessities.

I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons."

The play was a great success, but audience was a dismal failure."

The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last."

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Without danger I cannot be great. That is how I pay for Abel's blood. Danger and fear follow my steps everywhere. Without them courage would have no sense. And it is courage, courage, courage that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.

Now of all the idealist abominations that make society pestiferous I doubt if there be any so mean as that of forcing self-sacrifice on a woman under the pretense that she likes it.

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

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.

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

People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

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

Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.

I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul.

I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow's feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong.

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.

If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.

Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.