George Bernard Shaw
You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.Collection: Use
An idea that no one believes can not be proved too often.Collection: Believe
A serious illness or a death advertises the doctor exactly as a hanging advertises the barrister who defended the person hanged.Collection: Doctors
When your eyes are fixed in the stare of unconsciousness, and your throat coughs the last gasping breath - as one dragged in the dark to a great precipice - what assistance are a wife and child?Collection: Children
God's trustiest lieutenants often lack official credentials. They may be professed atheists who are also men of honour and high public spirit.Collection: Atheist
If all the Churches of Europe closed their doors until the drums ceased rolling they would act as a most powerful reminder that though the glory of war is a famous and ancient glory, it is not the final glory of God.Collection: Peace
Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.Collection: Death
When people shake their heads because we are living in a restless age, ask them how they would like to life in a stationary one, and do without changeCollection: Change
All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain.Collection: Teacher
A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.Collection: Hard Work
Men trifle with their business and their politics but never trifle with their games. It brings truth home to them. They cannot pretend they have won when they have lost nor that they had a magnificent drive when they foozled it. The Englishman is at his best on the links and at his worst in the Cabinet.Collection: Home
Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.Collection: Life
When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder column.Collection: Love
A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavor to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.Collection: Sleep
Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?Collection: Inspirational
Perhaps I had better inform my Protestant readers that the famous Dogma of Papal Infallibility is by far the most modest pretension of the kind in existence. Compared with our infallible democracies, our infallible medical councils, our infallible astronomers, our infallible judges, and our infallible parliaments, the Pope is on his knees in the dust confessing his ignorance before the throne of God, asking only that as to certain historical matters on which he has clearly more sources of information open to him than anyone else his decision shall be taken as final.Collection: Taken
The medieval doctors of divinity who did not pretend to settle how many angels could dance on the point of a needle cut a very poor figure as far as romantic credulity is concerned beside the modern physicists who have settled to the billionth of a millimetre every movement and position in the dance of the electrons. Not for worlds would I question the precise accuracy of these calculations or the existence of electrons (whatever they may be). The fate of Joan is a warning to me against such heresy.Collection: Angel
Imprisonment, as it exists today, is a worse crime than any of those committed by its victims.Collection: Society
When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, "The one I feed the most."Collection: Dog
The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.Collection: Atheist
If all you are going to do in life are the things that are convenient and comfortable, the great things never get done.Collection: Life
The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty . . . . Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys basic people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.Collection: Beauty
A married man is a man with a past, while a bachelor is a man with a future.Collection: Past
Money enables us to get what we want instead of what other people think we want.Collection: Thinking
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.Collection: Men
I have prophesied about the faith of Muhammad that it would be acceptable to the Europe of tomorrow as it is beginning to be acceptable to the Europe of today. ... I believe that if a man like him were to assume the dictatorship of the modern world he would succeed in solving its problems in a way that would bring it the much-needed peace and happiness.Collection: Islamic
A man's behaviour may be quite harmless and even beneficial, when he ismorally behaving like a scoundrel. And he may do great harm when he is morally acting on the highest principles.Collection: Men
I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation.Collection: Art
All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.Collection: Firsts
Music is the brandy of the damned.Collection: Music
A genius is a person who is seeing further and probing deeper than other people has a different set of ethical valuations from their and has energy enough to give effect to this extra vision and its valuations in whatever manner best suits his or herCollection: People
Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.Collection: Book
A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.Collection: Men
It's not that I'm so clever, it is that others are so stupid.Collection: Clever
What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.Collection: Children
Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst.Collection: Life
It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.Collection: Time
The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.Collection: Education
We cut the throat of a calf and hang it up by the heels to bleed to death so that our veal cutlet may be white; we nail geese to a board and cram them with food because we like the taste of liver disease; we tear birds to pieces to decorate our women's hats; we mutilate domestic animals for no reason at all except to follow an instinctively cruel fashion; and we connive at the most abominable tortures in the hope of discovering some magical cure for our own diseases by them.Collection: Fashion
People exaggerate the value of things they haven't got everybody worships truth and unselfishness because they have no experience with themCollection: People
An American has no sense of privacy. He does not know what it means.There is no such thing in the country.Collection: Country
Think what cowards men would be if they had to bear children. Women are altogether a superior species.Collection: Children
As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.Collection: Writing
We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?Collection: Church
Captain Shotover: How much does your soul eat? Ellie: Oh, a lot. It eats music and pictures and books and mountains and lakes and beautiful things to wear and nice people to be with.Collection: Beautiful
Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.Collection: Acceptance
The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.Collection: Car
We are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment, but for a very long time to come.Collection: Time
Who is this Baby Ruth? And what does she do?Collection: Funny