Top 500 George Bernard Shaw Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Words are only postage stamps delivering the object for you to unwrap.”

— George Bernard Shaw

452. “The savage bows down to idols of wood and stone, the civilized man to idols of flesh and blood.”

— George Bernard Shaw

453. “A mind of the caliber of mine cannot derive its nutrient from cows.”

— George Bernard Shaw

454. “If ‘Pygmalion’ is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary.”

— George Bernard Shaw

455. “Patriotism is a word which always commemorates a robbery.”

— George Bernard Shaw

456. “When we want to read of the deeds that are done for love, whither do we turn? To the murder column.”

— George Bernard Shaw

457. “Our political experiment of democracy, the last refuge of cheap misgovernment.”

— George Bernard Shaw

458. “The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.”

— George Bernard Shaw

459. “Affection between adults – if they are really adult in mind and not merely grown up children – and creatures so relatively selfish and cruel as children necessarily are without knowing it or meaning it, cannot be called natural.”

— George Bernard Shaw

460. “Though all society is founded on intolerance, all improvement is founded on tolerance.”

— George Bernard Shaw

461. “If all the economists were laid end to end, they’d never reach a conclusion.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

463. “When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, “The one I feed the most.””

— George Bernard Shaw

464. “A love affair should always be a honeymoon. And the only way to make sure of that is to keep changing the man; for the same man can never keep it up.”

— George Bernard Shaw

465. “There is nothing that can be changed more completely than human nature when the job is taken in hand early enough.”

— George Bernard Shaw

466. “Every man over forty is a scoundrel.”

— George Bernard Shaw

467. “He who desires a lifetime of happiness with a beautiful woman desires to enjoy the taste of wine by keeping his mouth always full of it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

468. “When the master has come to do everything through the slave, the slave becomes his master, since he cannot live without him.”

— George Bernard Shaw

469. “In the arts of peace Man is a bungler.”

— George Bernard Shaw

470. “Virtue consists, not in abstaining from vice, but in not desiring it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

471. “Nobel Prize money is a life-belt thrown to a swimmer who has already reached the shore in safety.”

— George Bernard Shaw

472. “Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.”

— George Bernard Shaw

473. “The trouble with the media is that it seems unable to distinguish between the end of the world and a bicycle accident.”

— George Bernard Shaw

474. “You’ll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.”

— George Bernard Shaw

475. “Fine art is the only teacher except torture.”

— George Bernard Shaw

476. “As you say, I am honoured and famous and rich. But as I have to do all the hard work, and suffer an increasing multitude of fools gladly, it does not feel any better than being reviled, infamous and poor, as I used to be.”

— George Bernard Shaw

477. “If you say that God is good, great, blessed, wise or any such thing, the starting point is this : God is.”

— George Bernard Shaw

478. “The open mind never acts: when we have done our utmost to arrive at a reasonable conclusion, we still must close our minds for the moment with a snap, and act dogmatically on our conclusions.”

— George Bernard Shaw

479. “All evolution in thought and conduct must at first appear as heresy and misconduct.”

— George Bernard Shaw

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

480. “Experience fails to teach where there is no desire to learn.”

— George Bernard Shaw

481. “The heart of an Irishman is nothing but his imagination.”

— George Bernard Shaw

482. “Time enough to think of the future when you haven’t any future to think of.”

— George Bernard Shaw

483. “You know, Tolstoy, like myself, wasn’t taken in by superstitions like science and medicine.”

— George Bernard Shaw

484. “No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.”

— George Bernard Shaw

485. “Vulgarity in a king flatters the majority of the nation.”

— George Bernard Shaw

486. “Communism, being the lay form of Catholicism, and indeed meaning the same thing, has never had any lack of chaplains.”

— George Bernard Shaw

487. “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

488. “Everything I eat has been proved by some doctor or other to be a deadly poison, and everything I don’t eat has been proved to be indispensable for life. But I go marching on.”

— George Bernard Shaw

489. “I sing, not arms and the hero, but the philosophic man: he who seeks in contemplation to discover the inner will of the world, ininvention to discover the means of fulfilling that will, and in action to do that will by the so-discovered means.”

— George Bernard Shaw

490. “There was only one virtue, pugnacity; only one vice, pacifism. That is an essential condition of war.”

— George Bernard Shaw

491. “It is not enough to know what is good: you must be able to do it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

492. “Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot! A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot. Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again! The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on.”

— George Bernard Shaw

493. “Nothing is more dangerous than a poor doctor: not even a poor employer or a poor landlord.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

495. “Hell is full of musical amateurs.”

— George Bernard Shaw

496. “The British churchgoer prefers a severe preacher because he thinks a few home truths will do his neighbors no harm.”

— George Bernard Shaw

497. “An Englishman does everything on principle: he fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.”

— George Bernard Shaw

498. “A married man forms married habits and becomes dependent on marriage just as a sailor becomes dependent on the sea.”

— George Bernard Shaw

499. “The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.”

— George Bernard Shaw

500. “Whenever an obviously well founded statement is made in England by a person specially well acquainted with the facts, that unlucky person is instantly and frantically contradicted by all the people who obviously know nothing about it.”

— George Bernard Shaw