Quotes By George Bernard Shaw

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

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

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

Give a man health and a course to steer, and he'll never stop to trouble about whether he's happy or not.

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.

Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.

Give women the vote, and in five years there will be a crushing tax on bachelors.

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.

Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.

I never climbed any ladder: I have achieved eminence by sheer gravitation.

Alcohol is a very necessary article. It enables Parliament to do things at eleven at night that no sane person would do at eleven in the morning.

In your dread of dictators you established a state of society in which every ward boss is a dictator, every private employer a dictator, every financier a dictator, all with the livelihood of the workers at his mercy, and no public responsibility.

A moderately honest man with a moderately faithful wife, moderate drinkers both, in a moderately healthy house: that is the true middle class unit.

The nation's morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.

A man learns to skate by staggering about and making a fool of himself. Indeed he progresses in all things by resolutely making a fool of himself.

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

Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.

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

Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance.