George Bernard Shaw
Once the divinity we worshipped made itself visible and comprehensible, we crucified it.Collection: Divinity
Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.Collection: Piano
The notion that Nature does not proceed by jumps is only one of the budget of plausible lies that we call classical education. Nature always proceeds by jumps. She may spend twenty thousand years making up her mind to jump; but when she makes it up at last, the jump is big enough to take us into a new age.Collection: Nature
The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.Collection: Joy
Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.Collection: Life
Happiness and beauty are by-products. Folly is the direct pursuit of happiness and beauty.Collection: Happiness
It is courage, courage, courage, that raises the blood of life to crimson splendor.Collection: Courage
Ladies and gentlemen are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.Collection: Funny
I have studied him - the wonderful man - and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ he must be called the saviour of humanity.Collection: Men
I make a fortune from criticizing the policy of the government, and then hand it over to the government in taxes to keep it going.Collection: Government
From a very early age, I've had to interrupt my education to go to school.Collection: Inspirational
Taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.Collection: Taxation
It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.Collection: Hate
He who has never hoped can never despairCollection: Inspirational
I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil ; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough.Collection: Evil
I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.Collection: Thinking
If you would stick to the concrete, and put your discoveries in the form of entertaining anecdotes about your adventures with women, your conversation would be easier to follow.Collection: Adventure
He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.Collection: Beautiful
Man is unique in that he has plans, purpose and goals which require the need for criteria of choice. The need for ethical value is within man whose future may largely be determined by the choice he makeCollection: Unique
Modern poverty is not the poverty that was blest in the Sermon on the Mount.Collection: Poverty
Two people getting together to write a book is like three people getting together to have a baby. One of them is superfluous.Collection: Funny
The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.Collection: Wisdom
Women are not angels. They are as foolish as men in many ways; but they have had to devote themselves to life whilst men have had to devote themselves to death; and that makes a vital difference in male and female religion. Women have been forced to fear whilst men have been forced to dare: the heroism of a woman is to nurse and protect life, and of a man to destroy it and court death.Collection: Angel
Very nice sort of place, Oxford, I should think, for people that like that sort of place. They teach you to be a gentleman there. In the polytechnic they teach you to be an engineer or such like. See?Collection: Nice
There are only two classes in good society in England: the equestrian classes and the neurotic classes.Collection: Horse
I talk democracy to these men and women. I tell them that they have the vote, and that theirs is the kingdom and the power and the glory. I say to them You are supreme: exercise your power. They say, That's right: tell us what to do; and I tell them. I say Exercise our vote intelligently by voting for me. And they do. That's democracy; and a splendid thing it is too for putting the right men in the right place.Collection: Exercise
The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.Collection: Art
Be like the sun and meadow, which are not in the least concerned about the coming winter.Collection: Winter
The British are apt to make merits of their stupidities, and to represent their various incapacities as points of good breeding.Collection: Funny
A dinner! How horrible! I am to be made the pretext for killing all those wretched animals and birds, and fish! Thank you for nothing. Now if it were to be a fast instead of a feast; say a solemn three days' abstention from corpses in my honour, I could at least pretend to believe that it was disinterested. Blood sacrifices are not in my lineCollection: Believe
It is assumed that the woman must wait, motionless, until she is wooed. That is how the spider waits for the fly.Collection: Wise
We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time, or we shall stick in the mud. Yet neither must we undertake a new world as catastrophic Utopians, and wreck our civilization in our hurry to mend it.Collection: Civilization
The one point on which all women are in furious secret rebellion against the existing law is the saddling of the right to a child with the obligation to become the servant of a man.Collection: Children
I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. . . . I tell you, gentlemen, if you can shew a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally.Collection: Selfish
It is necessary for the welfare of society that genius should be privileged to utter sedition, to blaspheme, to outrage good taste, to corrupt the youthful mind, and generally to scandalize one's uncles.Collection: Uncles
Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.Collection: Feet
I am a brigand: I live by robbing the rich.' 'I am a gentleman: I live by robbing the poor.Collection: Gentleman
No age or condition is without its heroes . The least incapable general in a nation is its Cæsar, the least imbecile statesman its Solon , the least confused thinker its Socrates , the least commonplace poet its Shakespeare .Collection: Confused
The road to ignorance is paved with good editions. Only the illiterate can afford to buy good books now.Collection: Book
The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud.Collection: People
Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.Collection: Money
War can so easily be gilt with romance and heroism and solemn national duty and patriotism and the like by persons whose superficial literary and oratorical talent covers an abyss of Godforsaken folly.Collection: War
We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment.Collection: Punishment
Whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit he was a first-rate political economist.Collection: God
Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.Collection: Praying
Of all the anti-social vested interests the worst is the vested interest in ill-health.Collection: Health
If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.Collection: Wicked
Now that we have learned to fly the air like birds, swim under water like fish, we lack one thing - to learn to live on earth as human beings.Collection: Air
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 on to future generations.Collection: Inspirational