George Bernard Shaw Quotes

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

A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.

Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated.

No diet will remove all the fat from your body, becayse the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.

The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.

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

That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.

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

Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man.

He knows nothing; and he thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

The worst sin... is... to be indifferent.

Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

As long as I have a want, I have a reason for living. Satisfaction is death.

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the support of Paul.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience!

Many a sinner has played himself into heaven on the trombone.

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

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.

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

We know there is intention and purpose in the universe, because there is intention and purpose in us.

There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.

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

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.

Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

A lifetime of happiness? No man alive could bear it; it would be hell on earth.

Self-denial is not a virtue, it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer.

Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.

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

The secret of forgiving everything is to understand nothing.

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

The more I see of the moneyed classes, the more I understand the guillotine.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

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

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

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

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

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

What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!