George Bernard Shaw: Quotes about people

George Bernard Shaw was Irish playwright. Explore interesting quotes on people.
George Bernard Shaw: 826 quotes39 likes

“Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.”

George Bernard Shaw The Devil's Disciple

The Devil's Disciple, Act II
1900s

“I don’t want to punish anybody, but there are an extraordinary number of people who I might want to kill…I think it would be a good thing to make everybody come before a properly appointed board just as he might come before the income tax commissioner and say every 5 years or every 7 years…just put them there and say, ‘Sir or madam will you be kind enough to justify your existence…if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little bit more then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive. Because your life does not benefit us and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.”

George Bernard Shaw

“George Bernard Shaw reopens capital punishment controversy”, Paramount British Pictures (March 5, 1931)
1930s

“You see, lots of the real people can't do it at all: they're such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. There's always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.”

George Bernard Shaw

1910s, Pygmalion (1912)

“The whole strength of England lies in the fact that the enormous majority of the English people are snobs.”

George Bernard Shaw

Hotchkiss
1900s, Getting Married (1908)

“The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud.”

George Bernard Shaw

1900s, Love Among the Artists (1900)

“Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.”

George Bernard Shaw

#83
1900s, Maxims for Revolutionists (1903)

“Monogamy has a sentimental basis which is quite distinct from the political one of equal numbers of the sexes. Equal numbers in the sexes are quite compatible with a change of partners every day or every hour. Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves, and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock. Accordingly, the people whose conception of marriage is a farm-yard or slave-quarter conception are always more or less in a panic lest the slightest relaxation of the marriage laws should utterly demoralize society; whilst those to whom marriage is a matter of more highly evolved sentiments and needs (sometimes said to be distinctively human, though birds and animals in a state of freedom evince them quite as touchingly as we) are much more liberal, knowing as they do that monogamy will take care of itself provided the parties are free enough, and that promiscuity is a product of slavery and not of liberty.”

George Bernard Shaw

Preface: &quot;The Personal Sentimental Basis of Monogamy&quot; http://www.enotalone.com/article/13714.html <br class="br">1900s, Getting Married (1908)

“I hold the Prophet of Arabia in great esteem and I can quite understand that it would have been impossible to restrain and wean that illiterate and perverse race, sunk in the miasma of utter moral depravity, from committing the most heinous of crimes, and imbue its people with enthusiasm to strive after righteousness and assimilate high morals and virtues, without projecting such a terrible and intensely awe inspiring spectacle of Hell and an equally captivating and enticing image of a land flowing with milk and honey to represent Heaven before their vision.”

George Bernard Shaw

Interview (April 1935) in The Genuine Islam, Vol. 1, No. 8 (1936), as quoted at &quot;A Shavian and a Theologian&quot; at World Islamic Mission http://www.wimnet.org/articles/shaviantheo.htm <br class="br">Disputed

“There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.”

George Bernard Shaw

1900s, Love Among the Artists (1900)

“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

“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)

“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 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