Top 500 George Bernard Shaw Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “If you take too long in deciding what to do with your life, you’ll find you’ve done it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

463. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

465. “We are members one of another; so that you cannot injure or help your neighbor without injuring or helping yourself.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

468. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

470. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

474. “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

475. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

480. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

486. “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

487. “Wisdom is wasted on the old, and youth is wasted on the young.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

490. “Hell is full of musical amateurs.”

— George Bernard Shaw

491. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

493. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

495. “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

496. “A soldier is an anachronism of which we must get rid.”

— George Bernard Shaw

497. “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

498. “Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.”

— George Bernard Shaw

499. “Nothing is ever done in this world until men are prepared to kill one another if it is not done.”

— George Bernard Shaw

500. “What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.”

— George Bernard Shaw