Top 500 George Bernard Shaw Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “No diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you could do is run for public office.”

— George Bernard Shaw

202. “I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

203. “First love is only a little foolishness and a lot of curiosity.”

— George Bernard Shaw

204. “What the world calls originality is only an unaccustomed method of tickling it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

206. “A family is a tyranny ruled over by it’s weakest member.”

— George Bernard Shaw

207. “We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry of our hearts.”

— George Bernard Shaw

208. “Well, sir, you never can tell. That’s a principle in life with me, sir, if you’ll excuse my having such a thing.”

— George Bernard Shaw

209. “If any religion had a chance of ruling over England, nay Europe within the next hundred years, it could be Islam.”

— George Bernard Shaw

210. “Help someone, you earn a friend. Help someone too much, you make an enemy.”

— George Bernard Shaw

211. “Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or worse.”

— George Bernard Shaw

212. “The most sincere form of love is love for food.”

— George Bernard Shaw

213. “Most people go to their grave with their music inside them.”

— George Bernard Shaw

214. “I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.”

— George Bernard Shaw

215. “A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.”

— George Bernard Shaw

216. “I was convinced that Ceylon is the cradle of the human race because everyone there looks an original.”

— George Bernard Shaw

217. “We are the living graves of murdered beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our appetites. How can we hope in this world to attain the peace we say we are so anxious for?”

— George Bernard Shaw

218. “Music is the brandy of the damned.”

— George Bernard Shaw

219. “You don’t learn to hold your own in the world by standing on guard, but by attacking, and getting well hammered yourself.”

— George Bernard Shaw

220. “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.”

— George Bernard Shaw

221. “I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle-class morality.”

— George Bernard Shaw

222. “Christianity might be a good thing if anyone ever tried it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

223. “Our first duty is not to be poor.”

— George Bernard Shaw

224. “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances.”

— George Bernard Shaw

225. “Everything happens to everybody sooner or later if there is time enough.”

— George Bernard Shaw

226. “The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it, and become blind to the arguments against it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

227. “Stimulate the phagocytes.”

— George Bernard Shaw

228. “Emotional excitement reaches men through tea, tobacco, opium, whisky, and religion.”

— George Bernard Shaw

229. “Where there is no knowledge ignorance calls itself science.”

— George Bernard Shaw

230. “Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.”

— George Bernard Shaw

231. “All government is cruel; for nothing is so cruel as impunity.”

— George Bernard Shaw

232. “Like fingerprints, all marriages are different.”

— George Bernard Shaw

233. “The educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one.”

— George Bernard Shaw

234. “All professions are conspiracies against the laity.”

— George Bernard Shaw

235. “The man with a toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty-stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.”

— George Bernard Shaw

236. “I am a Christian. That obliges me to be a Communist.”

— George Bernard Shaw

237. “The sound body is the product of the sound mind.”

— George Bernard Shaw

238. “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

239. “Remember that I too am mortal.”

— George Bernard Shaw

240. “The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.”

— George Bernard Shaw

241. “It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something.”

— George Bernard Shaw

242. “The best way to get your point across is to entertain.”

— George Bernard Shaw

243. “Whether you think Jesus was God or not, you must admit he was a first-rate political economist.”

— George Bernard Shaw

244. “All this struggling and striving to make the world better is a great mistake. Not that it’s wrong to try to improve the world if you know how but simply because struggling and striving are the worst possible ways to go about doing anything!”

— George Bernard Shaw

245. “I like to quote myself frequently and often, it makes me sound much more intelligent than I actually am.”

— George Bernard Shaw

246. “Absolute honesty is as absurd an abstraction as an absolute temperature or an absolute value.”

— George Bernard Shaw

247. “Compassion is the fellow-feeling of the unsound.”

— George Bernard Shaw

248. “It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”

— George Bernard Shaw

249. “The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.”

— George Bernard Shaw

250. “A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.”

— George Bernard Shaw