George Bernard Shaw: Trending quotes

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George Bernard Shaw: 826 quotes39 likes

“I don't believe in morality. I'm a disciple of Bernard Shaw.”

George Bernard Shaw

Act III
1910s, The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)

“The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.”

George Bernard Shaw

#26
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

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

George Bernard Shaw Saint Joan

Preface http://books.google.com/books?id=T70Ahd88jSMC&amp;q=%22It+is+difficult+if+not+impossible+for+most+people+to+think+otherwise+than+in+the+fashion+of+their+own+period%22&amp;pg=PA46#v=onepage to Saint Joan: A Chronicle Play In Six Scenes And An Epilogue (1923) <br class="br">1920s

George Bernard Shaw quote: “The secret of success is to offend the greatest number of people.”

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

George Bernard Shaw

As quoted in Days with Bernard Shaw (1949) by Stephen Winsten
1940s and later

“The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation.”

George Bernard Shaw

letter, 24 June 1930, to Frank Harris "To Frank Harris on Sex in Biography" Sixteen Self Sketches (1949)
1940s and later

“Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.”

George Bernard Shaw

Act II
1910s, Pygmalion (1912)

“I can wait: waiting and patience mean nothing to the eternal. I gave the woman the greatest of gifts: curiosity. By that her seed has been saved from my wrath; for I also am curious; and I have waited always to see what they will do tomorrow.”

George Bernard Shaw

Source: 1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

“There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.”

George Bernard Shaw

#68
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

“Why should you call me to account for eating decently? If I battened on the scorched corpses of animals, you might well ask me why I did that. Why should I be filthy and inhuman? Why should I be an accomplice in the wholesale horror and degradation of the slaughter-house?”

George Bernard Shaw

Interview &quot;What Vegetarianism Really Means: a Talk with Mr Bernard Shaw&quot;, in Vegetarian (15 January 1898), reprinted in Shaw: Interviews and Recollections, edited by A. M. Gibbs, 1990, p. 401 https://books.google.it/books?id=45muCwAAQBAJ&amp;pg=PA401 <br class="br">1890s

“Cusins: Call you poverty a crime?
Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.”

George Bernard Shaw

1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

“Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.”

George Bernard Shaw

Acis, in Pt. V
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

“Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or religion.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface
1900s, Getting Married (1908)

“I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer.”

George Bernard Shaw book Candida

Candida, Act III
1890s

“The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garrotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garrotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.”

George Bernard Shaw

#55
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

“Shaw: Madam, would you sleep with me for a million pounds?
Actress: My goodness, Well, I'd certainly think about it
Shaw: Would you sleep with me for a pound?
Actress: Certainly not! What kind of woman do you think I am?!
Shaw: Madam, we've already established that. Now we are haggling over the price.”

George Bernard Shaw

Similar remarks are also attributed to Winston Churchill, Groucho Marx and to Mark Twain
Disputed

“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

Preface
1900s, Getting Married (1908)

“The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.”

George Bernard Shaw

Act II
1890s, The Philanderer (1893)

“That proves it's not by Shaw, because all Shaw's characters are himself: mere puppets stuck up to spout Shaw.”

George Bernard Shaw Fanny's First Play

Fanny's First Play, Epilogue
1910s

“When a heretic wishes to avoid martyrdom he speaks of “Orthodoxy, True and False” and demonstrates that the True is his heresy.”

George Bernard Shaw

#172
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

“Again, there is the illusion of "increased command over Nature," meaning that cotton is cheap and that ten miles of country road on a bicycle have replaced four on foot. But even if man's increased command over Nature included any increased command over himself (the only sort of command relevant to his evolution into a higher being), the fact remains that it is only by running away from the increased command over Nature to country places where Nature is still in primitive command over Man that he can recover from the effects of the smoke, the stench, the foul air, the overcrowding, the racket, the ugliness, the dirt which the cheap cotton costs us.”

George Bernard Shaw

Notes
1890s, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)