Quotes by George Bernard Shaw

I never asked to be a king: it was pushed on me. So if you are going to say Son of St Louis: gird on the sword of your ancestors, and lead us to victory you may spare your breath to cool your porridge; for I cannot do it. I am not built that way; and there is an end of it.

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.

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered beasts, how can we expect any ideal conditions on this earth?

The most distinguished persons become more revolutionary as they grow older.

HIGGINS. 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 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 I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.

All censorships exist to prevent anyone 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 censorship.

A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

[Man] progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses.

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

I am sorry to have to introduce the subject of Christmas into these articles. It is an indecent subject; a cruel, gluttonous subject; a drunken, disorderly subject; a wasteful, disastrous, subject; a wicked, cadging, lying, filthy, blashphemous, and demoralizing subject. Christmas is forced on a reluctant and disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press: on its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery breath of universal hatred; and any one who looked back to it would be turned into a pillar of greasy sausages.

Hatred is the cowards revenge for being intimidated.

What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.

How can she? Shes incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does NOT triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

You dont stop laughing when you grow old, you grow old when you stop laughing.

The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.