George Bernard Shaw Quotes
Quotations and aphorisms by George Bernard Shaw:
The perfect love affair is one which is conducted entirely by post.
~George Bernard Shaw
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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
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No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
~George Bernard Shaw
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You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you had lost something.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The test of a man or woman's breeding is how they behave in a quarrel.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Those who do not know how to live must make a merit of dying.
~George Bernard Shaw
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England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.
~George Bernard Shaw
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An index is a great leveller.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Most people do not pray; they only beg.
~George Bernard Shaw
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There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
~George Bernard Shaw
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A man who has no office to go, to I don't care who he is, is a trial of which you can have no conception.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
~George Bernard Shaw
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A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
~George Bernard Shaw
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In socialism, private property is anathema, and equal distribution of income the first consideration. In capitalism, private property is cardinal, and distribution left to ensue from the play of free contract and selfish interest on that basis, no matter what anomalies it may present.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman, but believing what he read made him mad.
~George Bernard Shaw
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In this world there is always danger for those who are afraid of it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The only service a friend can really render is to keep up your courage by holding up to you a mirror in which you can see a noble image of yourself.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The secret to success is to offend the greatest number of people.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Socialism is the same as Communism, only better English.
~George Bernard Shaw
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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
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It is the mark of a truly intelligent person to be moved by statistics.
~George Bernard Shaw
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An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Do not try to live forever. You will not succeed.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Peace is not only better than war, but infinitely more arduous.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.
~George Bernard Shaw
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A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation - or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays - is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The love of economy is the root of all virtue.
~George Bernard Shaw
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If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.
~George Bernard Shaw
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You cannot be a hero without being a coward.
~George Bernard Shaw
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We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
~George Bernard Shaw
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We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Just do what must be done. This may not be happiness, but it is greatness.
~George Bernard Shaw
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If I were a woman, I'd simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I'd got the vote.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Americans adore me and will go on adoring me until I say something nice about them.
~George Bernard Shaw
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You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Life levels all men. Death reveals the eminent.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The trouble with her is that she lacks the power of conversation but not the power of speech.
~George Bernard Shaw
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You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Independence? That's middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
~George Bernard Shaw
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A man never tells you anything until you contradict him.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population.
~George Bernard Shaw
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A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.
~George Bernard Shaw
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If all the economists were laid end to end, they'd never reach a conclusion.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.
~George Bernard Shaw
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A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
~George Bernard Shaw
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We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Better never than late.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.
~George Bernard Shaw
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A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
~George Bernard Shaw
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A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The heretic is always better dead. And mortal eyes cannot distinguish the saint from the heretic.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Marriage is an alliance entered into by a man who can't sleep with the window shut, and a woman who can't sleep with the window open.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men's imperfections, and conceal your own.
~George Bernard Shaw
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A happy family is but an earlier heaven.
~George Bernard Shaw
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If you injure your neighbour, better not do it by halves.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Miracles, in the sense of phenomena we cannot explain, surround us on every hand: life itself is the miracle of miracles.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Marriage is popular because it combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.
~George Bernard Shaw
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When a man says money can do anything, that settles it: he hasn't got any.
~George Bernard Shaw
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There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.
~George Bernard Shaw
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You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?'
~George Bernard Shaw
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Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Use your health, even to the point of wearing it out. That is what it is for. Spend all you have before you die; do not outlive yourself.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Science never solves a problem without creating ten more.
~George Bernard Shaw
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All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Beauty is a short-lived tyranny.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Animals are my friends... and I don't eat my friends.
~George Bernard Shaw
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A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Socialism never arises in the earlier phases of capitalism, as, for instance, among the pioneers of civilisation in a country where there is plenty of land available for private appropriation by the last comer.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Creation is a miracle of daily recurrence. 'A miracle a minute' would not be a bad slogan for God.
~George Bernard Shaw
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If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The idea of personal salvation is intensely repugnant to me when it is not absurd. Imagine Roosevelt, the big brute, preserving his personality in a future state and swaggering about as a celestial Rough Rider!
~George Bernard Shaw
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Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for - scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
~George Bernard Shaw
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A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.
~George Bernard Shaw
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If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.
~George Bernard Shaw
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We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience.
~George Bernard Shaw
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When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
~George Bernard Shaw
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If you're not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can't be of very much use to yourself.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.
~George Bernard Shaw
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In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Political necessities sometime turn out to be political mistakes.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Lack of money is the root of all evil.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
~George Bernard Shaw
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A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
~George Bernard Shaw
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All great truths begin as blasphemies.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
~George Bernard Shaw
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It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I want to be all used up when I die.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.
~George Bernard Shaw
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It is most unwise for people in love to marry.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Life contains but two tragedies. One is not to get your heart's desire; the other is to get it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.
~George Bernard Shaw
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No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.
~George Bernard Shaw
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What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Few of us have vitality enough to make any of our instincts imperious.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The Nazi movement is in many respects one which has my warmest sympathy.
~George Bernard Shaw
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If a woman can, by careful selection of a father and nourishment of herself, produce a citizen with efficient senses, sound organs and a good digestion, she should clearly be secured a sufficient reward for that natural service to make her willing to undertake and repeat it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Youth is wasted on the young.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
~George Bernard Shaw
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A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Never fret for an only son, the idea of failure will never occur to him.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The only way to avoid being miserable is not to have enough leisure to wonder whether you are happy or not.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Property is organized robbery.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you get.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
~George Bernard Shaw
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If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.
~George Bernard Shaw
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People become attached to their burdens sometimes more than the burdens are attached to them.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Marriage is good enough for the lower classes: they have facilities for desertion that are denied to us.
~George Bernard Shaw
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We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
~George Bernard Shaw
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Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I'm an atheist and I thank God for it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
~George Bernard Shaw
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He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Virtue is insufficient temptation.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.
~George Bernard Shaw
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There is no sincerer love than the love of food.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.
~George Bernard Shaw
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It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
~George Bernard Shaw
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There is nothing more dangerous than the conscience of a bigot.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The possibilities are numerous once we decide to act and not react.
~George Bernard Shaw
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You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.
~George Bernard Shaw
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We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.
~George Bernard Shaw
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General consultant to mankind.
~George Bernard Shaw
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What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Parentage is a very important profession, but no test of fitness for it is ever imposed in the interest of the children.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Do not do unto others as you expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
~George Bernard Shaw
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If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
~George Bernard Shaw
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There is only one religion, though there are a hundred versions of it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.
~George Bernard Shaw
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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
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We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Very few people can afford to be poor.
~George Bernard Shaw
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It's easier to replace a dead man than a good picture.
~George Bernard Shaw
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If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.
~George Bernard Shaw
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We are the only real aristocracy in the world: the aristocracy of money.
~George Bernard Shaw
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If there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Caesar was a man of great common sense and good taste, meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.
~George Bernard Shaw
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An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
~George Bernard Shaw
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What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?
~George Bernard Shaw
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He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.
~George Bernard Shaw
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There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
~George Bernard Shaw
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You are going to let the fear of poverty govern you life and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live.
~George Bernard Shaw
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One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.
~George Bernard Shaw
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All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.
~George Bernard Shaw
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First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.
~George Bernard Shaw
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My method of getting a play across the footlights is like a revolver shooting: every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.
~George Bernard Shaw
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My reputation grows with every failure.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
~George Bernard Shaw
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When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Hell is full of musical amateurs.
~George Bernard Shaw
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What is virtue but the Trade Unionism of the married?
~George Bernard Shaw
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Find enough clever things to say, and you're a Prime Minister; write them down and you're a Shakespeare.
~George Bernard Shaw
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No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force.
~George Bernard Shaw
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An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.
~George Bernard Shaw
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While we ourselves are the living graves of murdered animals, how can we expect any ideal living conditions on this earth?
~George Bernard Shaw
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Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.
~George Bernard Shaw
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I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Syllables govern the world.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.
~George Bernard Shaw
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Alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operation of life.
~George Bernard Shaw
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The great advantage of a hotel is that it is a refuge from home life.
~George Bernard Shaw
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