George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. He was also an essayist, novelist and short story writer. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Issues which engaged Shaw’s attention included education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.
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Moderation is never applauded for its own sake.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Moderation
The relation of master and servant is advantageous only to masters who do not scruple to abuse their authority, and to servants who do not scruple to abuse their trust.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Servants
The unconscious self is the real genius. Your breathing goes wrong the moment your conscious self meddles with it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: The Unconscious Self
If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you’d best teach it to dance.
—George Bernard Shaw
Grain by grain, a loaf. Stone by stone, a palace.
—George Bernard Shaw
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
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Religion, Beliefs
The person I miss most is the one I could have been.
—George Bernard Shaw
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 for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.
—George Bernard Shaw
Though I can make my extravaganzas appear credible, I cannot make the truth appear so.
—George Bernard Shaw
The problem with communication is the illusion that it has been achieved.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Communication
Economy is the art of making the most of life. The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Virtues and Vices
Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
—George Bernard Shaw
In moments of progress the noble succeed, because things are going their way: in moments of decadence the base succeed for the same reason: hence the world is never without the exhilaration of contemporary success.
—George Bernard Shaw
In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Books, Literature
To a mathematician the eleventh means only a single unit : to the bushman who cannot count further than his ten fingers it is an incalculable myriad.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Greatness
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
—George Bernard Shaw
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Servants
Better keep yourself clean and bright. You are the window through which you must see the world.
—George Bernard Shaw
If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.
—George Bernard Shaw
A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
—George Bernard Shaw
The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Art and Riches, Comparisons, Opportunities, Reality, Beauty and Happiness
We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years, and justify our existence… on pain of liquidation.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Purpose
As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.
—George Bernard Shaw
The greatest evils and the worst of crimes is poverty; our first duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed, is not to be poor.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Poverty
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Change
It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Thought, Thoughts
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
—George Bernard Shaw
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
—George Bernard Shaw
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.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Aspirations, Goals, Health, Carpe-Diem
You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell: All hope abandon ye who enter here.
—George Bernard Shaw
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
—George Bernard Shaw
The difference between the shallowest routineer and the deepest thinker appears, to the latter, trifling ; to the former, infinite.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Greatness
No man dares say so much of what he thinks as to appear to himself an extremist.
—George Bernard Shaw
Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
—George Bernard Shaw
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
—George Bernard Shaw
Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarrass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Titles
Those who understand evil pardon it : those who resent it destroy it.
—George Bernard Shaw
The more a man possesses over and above what he uses, the more careworn he becomes.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Beauty and Happiness, Art and Riches
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.
—George Bernard Shaw
Decadence can find agents only when it wears the mask of progress.
—George Bernard Shaw
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 onto future generations.
—George Bernard Shaw
The power of accurate observation is frequently called cynicism by those who don’t have it.
—George Bernard Shaw
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge : it is more dangerous than ignorance.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Education
Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Crime and Punishment
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
—George Bernard Shaw
The most intolerable pain is produced by prolonging the keenest pleasure.
—George Bernard Shaw
People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I do not believe in circumstances. The people that get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they cannot find them, they make them.
—George Bernard Shaw
Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Virtues and Vices
We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
—George Bernard Shaw
We know now that the soul is the body, and the body the soul. They tell us they are different because they want to persuade us that we can keep our souls if we let them make slaves of our bodies.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Soul
Youth is wasted on the young.
—George Bernard Shaw
No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.
—George Bernard Shaw
Some look at things that are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not?
—George Bernard Shaw
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.
—George Bernard Shaw
The best reformers the world has ever seen are those who commence on themselves.
—George Bernard Shaw
Two starving men cannot be twice as hungry as one ; but two rascals can be ten times as vicious as one.
—George Bernard Shaw
The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent’s first duty.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Education
If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.
—George Bernard Shaw
Greatness is the secular name for Divinity : both mean simply what lies beyond us.
—George Bernard Shaw
Topics: Greatness
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