Explore Quotes by George Bernard Shaw

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

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

The thought of two thousand people crunching celery at the same time horrified me.

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.

Gentle Jesus, meek and mild' is a snivelling modern invention, with no warrant in the gospels.

Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his. . . . It would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

As an old soldier, I admit the cowardice: it's as universal as seasickness, and matters just as little.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship; and it seems hard to justify an incitement to it on anti-censorial principles.

What is self-control? It is nothing but a highly developed vital sense, dominating and regulating the mere appetites. To overlook the very existence of this supreme sense; to miss the obvious inference that it is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive.

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.

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.

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.

The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.

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

Syllables govern the world.

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

General consultant to mankind.

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