George Bernard Shaw
A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.Collection: Mother
It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's to keep unmarried as long as he can.Collection: Relationship
It is very doubtful whether man is enough of a political animal to produce a good, sensible, serious and efficient constitution. All the evidence is against it.Collection: Animal
Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors.Collection: Funny
Science becomes dangerous only when it imagines that it has reached its goal.Collection: Science
My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.Collection: Education
Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood.Collection: Country
I don't like the idea of killing my fellow creatures in order to eat their dead bodies.Collection: Order
Alcohol is a very necessary article. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.Collection: Morning
The Indian way of life provides the vision of the natural, real way of life. We veil ourselves with unnatural masks. On the face of India are the tender expressions which carry the mark of the Creators hand.Collection: Real
You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the government. And, with due respect to these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.Collection: Respect
It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact.Collection: Thinking
There is, on the whole, nothing on earth intended for innocent people so horrible as a school. To begin with, it is a prison. But in some respects more cruel than a prison. In a prison, for instance, you are not forced to read books written by the warders and the governor. . . .In the prison you are not forced to sit listening to turnkeys discoursing without charm or interest on subjects that they don't understand and don't care about, and therefore incapable of making you understand or care about. In a prison they may torture your body; but they do not torture your brains.Collection: Book
Take the utmost care to get well born and well brought up.Collection: Get Well
Perhaps you know some well-off families who do not seem to suffer from their riches. They do not overeat themselves; they find occupations to keep themselves in health; they do not worry about their position; they put their money into safe investments and are content with a low rate of interest; and they bring up their children to live simply and do useful work. But this means that they do not live like rich people at all, and might therefore just as well have ordinary incomes.Collection: Children
Altogether too many sheepCollection: Sheep
What I say today everybody will say tomorrow, though they will not remember who put it into their heads. Indeed they will be right for I never remember who puts things into my head : it is the Zeitgeist.Collection: Today
The plain working truth is that it is not only good for people to be shocked occasionally, but absolutely necessary to the progress of society that they should be shocked pretty often.Collection: Progress Of Society
Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.Collection: Forgiveness
Nothing can save us from a perpetual headlong fall into a bottomless abyss but a solid footing of dogma; and we no sooner agree to that than we find that the only trustworthy dogma is that there is no dogma.Collection: Fall
The test to which all methods of treatment are finally brought is whether they are lucrative to doctors or not.Collection: Doctors
But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.Collection: Running
Of the two lots, the woman's lot of perpetual motherhood, and the man's of perpetual babyhood, I prefer the man's.Collection: Inspirational
Why not give Christianity a trial?Collection: Giving
It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.Collection: Marriage
Man is the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.Collection: Animal
Hell is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.Collection: Hell
The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuaryCollection: Music
The ability to make witty observations is commonly refered to as "cynism" by people who lack it.Collection: Witty
The poor silly-clever Irishman takes off his hat to God's Englishman.Collection: Clever
Don't ask me for promises until I know what I am promising.Collection: Promise
A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.Collection: Men
In the arts of life main invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine. ... There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons.Collection: Death
What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.Collection: Inspiration
All religions begin with a revolt against morality, and perish when morality conquers them.Collection: Religion
A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor.Collection: Tired
Unbounded hopes were placed on each successive extension of the electoral franchise, culminating in the enfranchisement of women.These hopes have been disappointed, because the voters, male and female, being politically untrained and uneducated, have (a) no grasp of constructive measures; (b) loathe taxation as such; (c) dislike being governed at all; and (d) dread and resent any extension of official interference as an encroachment on their personal liberty.Collection: Voting
The British churchgoer prefers a severe preacher because he thinks a few home truths will do his neighbors no harm.Collection: Home
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.Collection: Cells
The degree of tolerance attainable at any moment depends on the strain under which society is maintaining its cohesion.Collection: Tolerance
Men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.Collection: Moving
Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.Collection: Inspirational
A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.Collection: Art
Englishmen never will be slaves; they are free to do whatever the government and public opinion allow them.Collection: Government
Patriotism is a word which always commemorates a robbery.Collection: Robbery
Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.Collection: Fear
A tranquil woman can go on sewing longer than an angry man can go on fuming.Collection: Women
We want a few mad people now. See where the sane ones have landed us!Collection: People
All young women begin by believing they can change and reform the men they marry. They can't.Collection: Marriage