George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people’s opinions will rush in from all quarters.

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

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 trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

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

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.

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

My reputation grows with every failure.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.

The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.

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

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

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

Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn’t be anything for us to do.

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

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

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

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

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

You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

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

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.

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

I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

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

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.

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

Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.

I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.

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

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

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

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

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

Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.

Syllables govern the world.

Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.

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

Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.

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

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

Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.

In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

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.

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

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.

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

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.

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

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