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George Bernard Shaw Quotes
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413 Quotes Unveiling the Wit and Wisdom of a Brilliant Mind

Discover the brilliant wit and wisdom of George Bernard Shaw with our collection of his most famous quotes. From life lessons to societal critiques, Shaw's words will entertain and inspire. Explore his thoughts on happiness, knowledge, friendship, and more, and prepare to see the world through a new lens.

George Bernard Shaw, also known as Bernard Shaw, was an influential Irish playwright, critic, polemicist, and political activist. He wrote over sixty plays, including notable works like "Man and Superman," "Pygmalion," and "Saint Joan." As the leading dramatist of his generation, Shaw's range incorporated contemporary satire and historical allegory. In recognition of his contributions to literature, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he faced initial struggles but eventually established himself as a respected theatre and music critic. He joined the Fabian Society, becoming its prominent pamphleteer after experiencing a political awakening. Known for expressing controversial views on subjects such as eugenics and organised religion, Shaw continued writing prolifically until his death at the age of ninety-four.

Despite varying scholarly opinions about his works since his passing, George Bernard Shaw is consistently regarded as one of the greatest British dramatists second only to Shakespeare. His influence on Western theatre and culture extends from the 1880s through today. The word "Shavian" has entered the English language to encapsulate Shaw's ideas and unique means of expressing them.

✵ 26. July 1856 – 2. November 1950
George Bernard Shaw photo
George Bernard Shaw: 413   quotes 39   likes

George Bernard Shaw Quotes

“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)

Love , Women

“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)

Falseness

“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)

Nature , Country

“Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.”

George Bernard Shaw book The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism

The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism, Chapter 82 http://books.google.com/books?id=ys13gZliXFAC (1928)
1920s

Life , Death , Women , Men

“I was a cannibal for twenty-five years. For the rest I have been a vegetarian. It was Shelley who first opened my eyes to the savagery of my diet.”

George Bernard Shaw

Interview "Who I Am, and What I Think", in Frank Harris's periodical The Candid Friend (May 1901), reprinted in Sixteen Self Sketches, 1949, p. 53; quoted in Desmond King-Hele, Shelley: His Thought and Work, 1984, p. 42 https://books.google.it/books?id=V5KvCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA42
1900s

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

George Bernard Shaw Three Plays for Puritans

Three Plays for Puritans, Preface (1900)
1900s

Fashion

“There have been summits of civilization at which heretics like Socrates, who was killed because he was wiser than his neighbors, have not been tortured, but ordered to kill themselves in the most painless manner known to their judges. But from that summit there was a speedy relapse into our present savagery.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface; Cruelty's Excuses
1930s, On the Rocks (1933)

“The reformer for whom the world is not good enough finds himself shoulder to shoulder with him that is not good enough for the world.”

George Bernard Shaw

#158
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

World

“He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.”

George Bernard Shaw

#105
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Beauty , Wine , Happiness

“You are so careful of your boy's morals, knowing how troublesome they may be, that you keep him away from the Venus of Milo only to find him in the arms of the scullery maid or someone much worse. You decide that the Hermes of Praxiteles and Wagner's Tristan are not suited for young girls; and your daughter marries somebody appallingly unlike either Hermes or Tristan solely to escape from your parental protection. You have not stifled a single passion nor averted a single danger: you have depraved the passions by starving them, and broken down all the defences which so effectively protect children brought up in freedom.”

George Bernard Shaw

1910s, A Treatise on Parents and Children (1910)

Children , Girl , Boy , Parent

“We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.”

George Bernard Shaw You Never Can Tell

You Never Can Tell, Act I (1898)
1890s

“It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.”

George Bernard Shaw

#65
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

“Life must not cease. That comes before everything. It is silly to say you do not care. You do care. It is that care that will prompt your imagination; inflame your desires; make your will irresistible; and create out of nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw

The Serpent, in Pt. I, Act I
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

Life , Imagination

“All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense.”

George Bernard Shaw

1900s, Love Among the Artists (1900)

Fashion , Sense

“Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make … lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface
1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

Life , Men , Nature

“All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.”

George Bernard Shaw

Pilate, as portrayed in Preface, Difference Between Reader And Spectator
1930s, On the Rocks (1933)

“You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.”

George Bernard Shaw

Eve to Cain, in Pt. I, Act II
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

Life , Death , Lie , Feeling

“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

#162
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

Fight

“Nothing is more dreadful than a husband who keeps telling you everything he thinks, and always wants to know what you think.”

George Bernard Shaw

The Bishop
1900s, Getting Married (1908)

Thinking

“Love is an appetite which, like all other appetites, is destroyed for the moment by its gratification.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface
1900s, Getting Married (1908)

Love

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

George Bernard Shaw

Source: 1900s, Man and Superman (1903), p. xxxi

Life , World , Nature , Joy

“Hail, Sphinx: salutation from Julius Caesar! I have wandered in many lands, seeking the lost regions from which my birth into this world exiled me, and the company of creatures such as I myself. I have found flocks and pastures, men and cities, but no other Caesar, no air native to me, no man kindred to me, none who can do my day's deed, and think my night's thought.”

George Bernard Shaw

Act I
1890s, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)

Men , World , Birth , Thinking

“Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface
1910s, The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)

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

George Bernard Shaw

1900s, Love Among the Artists (1900)

Hate , Music , Thinking

“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

Education , School , Time

“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
1910s, The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)
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)

Age

“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

Hope

“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

Beauty , Lovers , Appearance

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

George Bernard Shaw

Preface
1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

Evil

“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

Hate , Indifference

“You can't make a man a Christian unless you first make him believe he is a sinner.”

George Bernard Shaw

Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living (1937), p. 17
Misattributed

“A: How about $1?”

George Bernard Shaw

Misattributed

“He [the British taxpayer] must be taught that war is not precise or economical. It is almost inconceivably wasteful and extravagant. It burns the house to roast the pig, and even then seldom roasts him effectively..... waste is the law of modern war; and nothing is cheap on the battlefield except the lives of men...... Therefore, my taxpayer, resign yourself to this: that we may fight bravely, fight hard, fight long, fight cunningly, fight recklessly, fight in a hundred and fifty ways, but we cannot fight cheaply.”

George Bernard Shaw

The Daily Chronicle on the 7 March 1917 https://www.rte.ie/centuryireland/index.php/articles/george-bernard-shaw-joyriding-on-the-front.
1910s, The Technique of War (1917)

Housing , Law , War , Way

“Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi.”

George Bernard Shaw Pygmalion

Act III
1910s, Pygmalion (1912)

“It is not the sale of my soul that troubles me: I have sold it too often to care about that. I have sold it for a professorship. I have sold it for an income. ... What is all human conduct but the daily and hourly sale of our souls for trifles?”

George Bernard Shaw Major Barbara

Source: 1900s, Major Barbara (1905)

Soul

“THEODOTUS: Caesar: you are a stranger here, and not conversant with our laws. The kings and queens of Egypt may not marry except with their own royal blood. Ptolemy and Cleopatra are born king and consort just as they are born brother and sister.
BRITANNUS (shocked): Caesar: this is not proper.
THEODOTUS (outraged): How!
CAESAR (recovering his self-possession): Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature.”

George Bernard Shaw Caesar and Cleopatra

Act II; sometimes paraphrased as: The customs of your tribe are not laws of nature.
1890s, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)

Law , Nature , Thinking , Sister

“There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.”

George Bernard Shaw Back to Methuselah

Confucius, in Pt. III : The Thing Happens
1920s, Back to Methuselah (1921)

Secret