Best George Bernard Shaw Quotes

A broken heart is a very pleasant complaint for a man in London if he has a comfortable income.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

If the announcer can produce the impression that he is a gentlemen, he may pronounce as he pleases.

Whenever you wish to do anything against the law, Cicely, always consult a good solicitor first.

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.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.

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.

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

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.

Life is a disease; and the only difference between one man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives. You are always at the crisis: I am always in the convalescent stage.

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

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

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

The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.

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

I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.

I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone: the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.

As long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well.

A man's interest in the world is only an overflow from his interest in himself.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

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

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?

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

Physically there is nothing to distinguish human society from the farm-yard except that children are more troublesome and costly than chickens and calves and that men and women are not so completely enslaved as farm stock.

The fickleness of the women I love is only equaled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.

First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity: no really self-respecting woman would take advantage of it.

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 base people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.

Morality is suspecting other people of not being legally married.

An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable.

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

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned.

Put an Irishman on the spit and you can always get another Irishman to turn him.

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.

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.

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.

You will never have a quiet world until you knock the patriotism out of the human race.

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

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

Better see rightly on a pound a week than squint on a million.

Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity, and beauty as conspicuously as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness, and ugliness.