Quotations from
George Bernard Shaw
[1856-1950]

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“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful, than a life spent doing nothing.”  {blog 12/2017}
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“A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.”  {blog 2/2018}
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“Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.”   {blog 3/2018}
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“People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are
the people who get up and look for the circumstances [that] they want, and if they can't find them, make them.”  {blog 3/2018}
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“Democracy is a device that ensures [that] we shall be governed no better than we deserve.”  {blog 6/2018}
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“The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.”  {blog 10/2018}
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“Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”  {blog 2/2021}
second version: “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.”
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“The longer I live, the more convinced am I that this planet is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum.”  {blog 7/2021}
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“No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.”  {blog 1/2022}
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"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; Bring a friend, if you have one."
~~ George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill
response "Cannot possibly attend first night, I will attend the second . . . If there is one."
~~ Sir Winston Churchill [1874-1965] to George Bernard Shaw
{blog 10/2022}

G.B. Shaw Quotations Not Yet Used on the Blog

"England and America are two countries divided by the same language."

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

"I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.
I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live."

"He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches."

"All censorships exist to prevent any one from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently the first condition of progress is the removal of censorships."

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

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple.
But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

"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."

"If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."

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

"The golden rule is that there are no golden rules."

"I'm only a beer teetotaller, not a champagne teetotaller."

"A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth."

"An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable."

"Do not unto others as you would they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."
second version: "Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same."

"Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity."

"Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned."

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

"Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few."

"The theory of legal procedure is that if you set two liars to expose one another, the truth will emerge."

"The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business."

"Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn."

"As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death."

"Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire."

"Don't waste time collecting other people's autographs; rather devote it to making your own autograph worth collecting."

"The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is."

"If you eliminate smoking and gambling, you will be amazed to find that almost all an Englishman's pleasures can be,
and mostly are, shared by his dog."

"He treats a flower girl as if she was a duchess, and a duchess as if she was a flower girl."

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"A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income."

"A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned."

"A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic."

"A genius can't be forced; nor can you make an ape an alderman."

"A happy family is but an earlier heaven."

"A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold."

"A man never tells you anything until you contradict him."

"A man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage."

"A mind of the calibre of mine cannot derive its nutriment from cows."

"A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected." --- ??

"A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell."

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

"All great truths begin as blasphemies."

"All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it."

"Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend - if you have one."

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

"An asylum for the sane would be empty in America."

"An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it."

"An index is a great leveller."

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

"Any man who is not a communist at the age of twenty is a fool. Any man who is still a communist at the age of thirty is an even bigger fool."

"As well consult a butcher on the value of vegetarianism as a doctor on the worth of vaccination."

"Assassination is the extreme form of censorship."
The Rejected Statement -- Part I, The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet, 1911

"At present, intelligent people do not have their children vaccinated, nor does the law now compel them to. The result is not, as the Jennerians prophesied, the extermination of the human race by smallpox; on the contrary more people are now killed by vaccination than by smallpox."

"Beauty is a short-lived tyranny."

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

"Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world."

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

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

"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."

"Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own."

"Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men."

"Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life."

"Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt."

"Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices."

"Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed."

"Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple . . . Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don't know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond."

"Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one's heart; but death is a splendid thing
- a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces."

"Every man over forty is a scoundrel."

"Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it."

"Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough."

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

"Fashions are the only induced epidemics, proving that epidemics can be induced by tradesmen."

"Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious."

"Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare."

"First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity."

"Forget about likes and dislikes. They are of no consequence. Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness."

"Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!"

"General consultant to mankind."

"Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not."

"Go anywhere in England where there are natural wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you find?
That the stables are the real centre of the household."

"Go on writing plays, my boy. One of these days one of these London producers will go into his office and say to his secretary, Is there a play from Shaw this morning? and when she says, No, he will say, Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish. And that's your chance, my boy."

"He didn't dare to, because his father had a weak heart and habitually threatened to drop dead if anybody hurt his feelings. You may have noticed that people with weak hearts are the tyrants of English married life."

"He's a man of great common sense and good taste - meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage."

"Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history."

"Hell is full of musical amateurs."

"Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like.
Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself."

"Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo."

"How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.

"I absolutely forbid any such outrage."

"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."

"I can forgive Alfred Nobel for having invented dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."

"I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad."

"I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female
the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind."

"I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while."

"I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation."

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

"I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people."

"I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake."

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

"I'm not a teacher: only a fellow-traveller of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead - ahead of myself as well as you."

"I've posed nude for a photographer in the manner of Rodin's 'Thinker', but I merely looked constipated."

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

"If parents would only realize how they bore their children!"

"If 'Pygmalion' is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary."

"If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative
litt'rateur, or a musical confectioner, or a painter of fans with cupids and cocottes. Handel had power."

"If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance."

"If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves."

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

"If you strike a child take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood
neither can nor should be forgiven."

"Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine, and at last you create what you will."

"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."

"In heaven an angel is nobody in particular."

"In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it."

"In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold, and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from
thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage."

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

"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."

"It is a noteworthy fact that kicking and beating have played so considerable a part in the habits which necessity has imposed on mankind in past ages that the only way of preventing civilized men from beating and kicking their wives is to organize games in which they can kick and beat balls."

"It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid."

"It is fortunate to come of distinguished ancestry. It is not less so to be such that people do not care to inquire
whether you are of high descent or not."

"It is most unwise for people in love to marry."

"It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics."

"It was from Handel that I learned that style consists in force of assertion."

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

"Let a short Act of Parliament be passed, placing all street musicians outside the protection of the law, so that any citizen
may assail them with stones, sticks, knives, pistols or bombs without incurring any penalties."

"Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to
make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations."

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

"Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent."

"Life on board a pleasure steamer violates every moral and physical condition of healthy life except fresh air . . .
It is a guzzling, lounging, gambling, dog's life. The only alternative to excitement is irritability."

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

"Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long."

"Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea
for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice."

"Manners are more important than laws and upon them, to a great deal, the law depends."

"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."

"Marriage: 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."

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

"Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience."

"Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability."

"Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles."

"Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty
as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness."

"Most people do not pray; they only beg."

"My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably."

"My reputation grows with every failure."

"Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him."

"Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run."

"New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions
open to discussion, and finally as established truths."

"No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain,
you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office."

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

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

"Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no sincerer love than the love of food."

"Only lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty."

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

"Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity,
except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition."

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

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

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

"People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on
in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them."

"People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them."

"People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it."

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

"Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes."

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

"Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions.
It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones."

"Property is organized robbery."

"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad."

"Science never solves a problem without creating ten more."

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

"She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech."
"The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech."

"Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English."

"Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive."

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

"Syllables govern the world."

"Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get."

"The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest
circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom."

"The art of government is the organisation of idolatry."

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

"The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office."

"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 faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier."

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

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

"The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind,
the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it."

"The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another."

"The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains
that I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time."

"The love of economy is the root of all virtue."

"The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time."

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

"The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong."

"The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it."

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

"The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me."

"The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves."

"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."

"The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them."

"The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post."

"The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react."

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."

"The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary, rather tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up
as Handel or Beethoven and making a prolonged and intolerable noise."

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

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

"The seven deadly sins . . . food, clothing, firing, rent, taxes, respectability, and children. Nothing can lift those seven millstones
from man's neck but money; and the spirit cannot soar until the millstones are lifted."

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

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

"The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy,
sooner than work at anything but his art."

"The true joy of life is being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being thoroughly worn out before you are
thrown to the scrap heap, being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish clod of ailments and grievances."

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

"The utmost I can bear for myself in my best days is that I was one of the hundred best playwrights
in the world, which is hardly a supreme distinction."

"There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes."

"There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem."

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

"There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it."

"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."

"To withhold deserved praise lest it should make its object conceited is as dishonest as to withhold payment
of a just debt lest your creditor should spend the money badly."

"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."

"Very few people can afford to be poor."

"Virtue is insufficient temptation."

"Vivisection is a social evil because if it advances human knowledge, it does so at the expense of human character."

"We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth."

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

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

"We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be."

"We've already established what you are, ma'am. Now we're just haggling over the price."

"What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?"

"What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so?
The smell of roses, you think? No, moldering books."

"What is virtue but the trade unionism of the married?"

"What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know
instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity."

"What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience,
of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real."

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

"When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any."

"When a man wants to murder a tiger, he calls it sport; when the tiger wants to murder him, he calls it ferocity.
The distinction between crime and justice is no greater."

"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty."

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

"When our relatives are at home, we have to think of all their good points or it would be impossible to endure them.
But when they are away, we console ourselves for their absence by dwelling on their vices."

"When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind."

"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 until death do them part."

"When your eyes are fixed in the stare of unconsciousness, and your throat coughs the last gasping breath
- as one dragged in the dark to a great precipice - what assistance are a wife and child?"

"Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course."

"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."

"Why should we take advice on sex from the Pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!"

"Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable."

"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."

"You cannot be a hero without being a coward."

"You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members
of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold."

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