I often quote myself; it adds spice to my conversation.
-- 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
Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
-- George Bernard Shaw
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?
-- George Bernard Shaw
Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
What a piece of work is man! says the poet. Yes: but what a blunderer! Here is the highest miracle of organization yet attained by life, the most intensely alive thing that exists, the most conscious of all the organisms; and yet, how wretched are his brains! Stupidity made sordid and cruel by the realities learnt from toil and poverty: Imagination resolved to starve sooner than face these realities, piling up illusions to hide them, and calling itself cleverness, genius! And each accusing the other of its own defect: Stupidity accusing Imagination of folly, and Imagination accusing Stupidity of ignorance: whereas, alas! Stupidity has all the knowledge, and Imagination all the intelligence.
-- George Bernard Shaw
The earth is a nursery in which men and women play at being heroes and heroines, saints and sinners; but they are dragged down from their fool's paradise by their bodies: hunger and cold and thirst, age and decay and disease, death above all, make them slaves of reality: thrice a day meals must be eaten and digested: thrice a century a new generation must be engendered: ages of faith, of romance, and of science are all driven at last to have but one prayer "Make me a healthy animal."
-- George Bernard Shaw
In the arts of peace Man is a bungler. I have seen his cotton factories and the like, with machinery that a greedy dog could have invented if it had wanted money instead of food. I know his clumsy typewriters and bungling locomotives and tedious bicycles: they are toys compared to the Maxim gun, the submarine torpedo boat. There is nothing in Man's industrial machinery but his greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons. This marvellous force of Life of which you boast is a force of Death: Man measures his strength by his destructiveness.
-- George Bernard Shaw
...Man, the inventor of the rack, the stake, the gallows, and the electrocutor; of the sword and gun; above all, of justice, duty, patriotism and all the other isms by which even those who are clever enough to be humanely disposed are persuaded to become the most destructive of all the destroyers.
-- George Bernard Shaw
When the military man approaches, the world locks up its spoons and packs off its womankind. No: I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, in invention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
-- George Bernard Shaw
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.
-- George Bernard Shaw
An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.
-- George Bernard Shaw
When the world goes mad, one must accept madness as sanity; since sanity is, in the last analysis, nothing but the madness on which the whole world happens to agree.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
-- George Bernard Shaw
The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
-- George Bernard Shaw
I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum.
-- George Bernard Shaw
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.
-- George Bernard Shaw
You have to choose between trusting to the natural stability of gold and the natural stability of the honesty and intelligence of the members of the Government. And, with due respect for these gentlemen, I advise you, as long as the Capitalist system lasts, to vote for gold.
-- George Bernard Shaw
What a man believes may be ascertained, not from his creed, but from the assumptions on which he habitually acts.
-- George Bernard Shaw
If economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion
-- George Bernard Shaw
My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he never forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
-- George Bernard Shaw
When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.
-- George Bernard Shaw
We have no more right to consume happiness without producing it than to consume wealth without producing it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
My way of joking is to tell the truth. It's the funniest joke in the world.
-- George Bernard Shaw
England and America are two countries separated by the same language.
-- George Bernard Shaw
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
-- George Bernard Shaw
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend upon the support of Paul.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Better keep yourself clean and bright; you are the window through which you must see the world.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Build a system that even a fool can use, and only a fool will want to use it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
-- George Bernard Shaw
It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh.
-- George Bernard Shaw
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.
-- George Bernard Shaw
Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
-- George Bernard Shaw
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
-- George Bernard Shaw
The Churches must learn humility as well as teach it.
Technorati Tags: Quotations
Post new comment