Explore Quotes by George Bernard Shaw

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

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

The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.

If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it.

The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Liberty is the breath of life to nations.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

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

Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population.

There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.

If you're not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little 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.

She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.

Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.

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

My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion.

I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for - scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself.

Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.

We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.

The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.