Quotes by George Bernard Shaw
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Woman's happiness begins with her first love and ends about then.

In a hospital they throw you out into the street before you are half cured, but in a nursing home they don't let you out till you are dead.

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the whole community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

The roulette table pays nobody except him that keeps it. Nevertheless a passion for gaming is common, though a passion for keeping roulette tables is unknown.

I never expect a soldier to think.

I am very sorry, but I cannot learn languages. I have tried hard, only to find that men of ordinary capacity can learn Sanskrit in less time that it takes me to buy a German Dictionary.

No severity of punishment deters when detection is uncertain, as it always must be.

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.

History, sir, will tell lies as usual.

The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization.

Two percent of the people think; three percent of the people think they think; and ninety-five percent of the people would rather die than think.

It is the highest creatures who take the longest to mature, and are the most helpless during their immaturity.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

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

Don't think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.

A man thinking or working is always alone, let him be where he will.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

Life is a flame that is always burning itself out, but it catches fire again every time a child is born.

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

We are the living graves of murdered beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our appetites. How can we hope in this world to attain the peace we say we are so anxious for?

Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into an oak! Bury a sheep, and nothing happens but decay.

We are the living graves of murdered beasts.

A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

I choose not to make a graveyard of my body for the rotting corpses of dead animals.

Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.

Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out.

It is not enough to know what is good: you must be able to do it.

Treat a friend as a person who may someday become your enemy; an enemy as a person who may someday become your friend.

If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you'll find you've done it.

Be like the sun and meadow, which are not in the least concerned about the coming winter.

Life is too short for men to take it seriously.

When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters anymore. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

People are always blaming circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get ahead in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Some men see things as they are and say why -- I dream things that never were and say why not.

Liberty is the breath of life to nations.

Two things define you: your patience when you have nothing and your attitude when you have everything.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.

Self-control is the quality that distinguishes the fittest to survive.

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

You are the only sort of man in whose existence I see much hope for in this deplorable world.

He who has never hoped can never despair.

Those who understand evil pardon it.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

When you loved me I gave you the whole sun and stars to play with. I gave you eternity in a single moment, strength of the mountains in one clasp of your arms, and the volume of all the seas in one impulse of your soul.

Fashions, after all, are only induced epidemics.

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

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.

We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.

There is no sincerer love than the love of food.

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

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

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

There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.

There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.

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

What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?

The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

My reputation grows with every failure.

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.

An index is a great leveller.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.

Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

Very few people can afford to be poor.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.

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

The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.

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

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

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.

The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?

The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.

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

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.

When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.

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

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

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

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

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

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

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

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.

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

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