George Bernard Shaw: Trending quotes

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George Bernard Shaw: 826 quotes39 likes

“I have to live for others and not for myself; that's middle-class morality.”

Act V
1910s, Pygmalion (1912)

“I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats.”

1900s, Love Among the Artists (1900)

“The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier: the manners and habits of a duke would cost a city clerk his situation.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface
1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

“The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.”

George Bernard Shaw

Widely attributed to Shaw from the 1970s onward, but not known to exist in his published works. It is in keeping with some of his sardonic statements about the purposes and effectiveness of schools. First known attribution in print is in Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner's Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1971), "G. B. Shaw's line that the only time his education was interrupted was when he was in school captures the sense of this alienation."
Attributed

“No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it well, ever loses his self-respect.”

George Bernard Shaw The Doctor's Dilemma

Preface http://books.google.com/books?id=aniaAAAAIAAJ&q=%22No+man+who+is+occupied+in+doing+a+very+difficult+thing+and+doing+it+very+well+ever+loses+his+self-respect%22&pg=PR22#v=onepage <br class="br">1910s, The Doctor's Dilemma (1911) <br class="br">Variant: No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

“No age or condition is without its heroes. The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon, the least confused thinker its Socrates, the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare.”

George Bernard Shaw

#136
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

“But no public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means; and I have no reason to hope that Mr Coote may be an exception to the rule.”

George Bernard Shaw

"The Living Pictures", The Saturday Review, LXXIX (April 6, 1895), 443, reprinted in Our Theatres in the Nineties (1932). Vol. 1. London: Constable & Co. 79-86
1890s

“The epithet beautiful is used by surgeons to describe operations which their patients describe as ghastly, by physicists to describe methods of measurement which leave sentimentalists cold, by lawyers to describe cases which ruin all the parties to them, and by lovers to describe the objects of their infatuation, however unattractive they may appear to the unaffected spectators.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface to Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: A Correspondence (1931)
1940s and later

“The greatest of evils and the worst of crimes is poverty.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface
1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

“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 Devil's Disciple

The Devil's Disciple, Act II (1901)
1900s

“I wouldn't have ate it, only I'm too lady-like to take it out of my mouth.”

George Bernard Shaw

Act II
1910s, Pygmalion (1912)