Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw
Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.
George Bernard Shaw
Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has
the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
George Bernard Shaw
I'm not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead -
ahead of myself as well as you.
George Bernard Shaw
We hate those who will not take our advice, and despise them who do.
Henry Wheeler Shaw
If you value a man's regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper - and
despise it.
George Bernard Shaw
Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
George Bernard Shaw
Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
George Bernard Shaw
I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.
George Bernard Shaw
Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
George Bernard Shaw
The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to
be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of
government officials and policemen.
George Bernard Shaw
Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman
loves a pedigree.
George Bernard Shaw
In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
George Bernard Shaw
Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
George Bernard Shaw
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
George Bernard Shaw
No one can contemplate the present condition of the masses of the people without desiring
something like a revolution for the better.
Sir Robert Giffen
A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.
George Bernard Shaw
No doubt it is easy to demostrate that property will destroy society unless society
destroys it.
George Bernard Shaw
What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of
it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our
circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.
George Bernard Shaw
The politician who once had to learn how to flatter Kings has now to learn how to
fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.
George Bernard Shaw
No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and
fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a
commercial civilization.
George Bernard Shaw
Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be
the same.
George Bernard Shaw
The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of
functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters.
George Bernard Shaw
Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
George Bernard Shaw
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw
A fool's brain digest philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into
pedantry. Hence University education.
George Bernard Shaw
The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child's character.
George Bernard Shaw
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
George Bernard Shaw
A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is
more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw
Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or
morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
George Bernard Shaw
No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
George Bernard Shaw
Assasination on the scaffold is the worst form of assasination, because there it is
invested with the approval of society.
George Bernard Shaw
Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.
George Bernard Shaw
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him
he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
George Bernard Shaw
Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
George Bernard Shaw
Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.
George Bernard Shaw
Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered
on the subject.
George Bernard Shaw
Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity
of its parasites.
George Bernard Shaw
Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
George Bernard Shaw
Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
George Bernard Shaw
Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from
neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
George Bernard Shaw
In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and
unhappiness.
George Bernard Shaw
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.
George Bernard Shaw
Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the
crimes.
George Bernard Shaw
Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten
material.
George Bernard Shaw
Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is why the bishops
dare not denounce it fundamentally.
George Bernard Shaw
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty:
what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
George Bernard Shaw
If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.
George Bernard Shaw
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw
I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
George Bernard Shaw
I would be married, but I'd have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
Richard Crashaw
In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that
it's more dangerous to lose than to win.
George Bernard Shaw
Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the
house three days?
George Bernard Shaw
In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and
treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a
year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.
George Bernard Shaw
Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the
children. Wear violet and purple. Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they
don't know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead
of a bond.
George Bernard Shaw
You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the
stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of
obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the
same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.
George Bernard Shaw
How can you dare teach a man to read until you've taught him everything else first?
George Bernard Shaw
Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except
the books nobody reads.
George Bernard Shaw
When you've got something to prove, there's nothing greater than a challenge.
Terry Bradshaw
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot
change anything.
George Bernard Shaw
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to
adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw
