Top 500 George Bernard Shaw Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short- a gentlemanly gas deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel.”

— George Bernard Shaw

252. “Our necessities are few, but our wants are endless.”

— George Bernard Shaw

253. “No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious.”

— George Bernard Shaw

254. “Never forget that if you leave your law to judges and your religion to bishops, you will presently find yourself without either law or religion.”

— George Bernard Shaw

255. “Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.”

— George Bernard Shaw

256. “No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.”

— George Bernard Shaw

257. “That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.”

— George Bernard Shaw

258. “Paradoxes are the only truths.”

— George Bernard Shaw

259. “A man of my spiritual intensity does not eat corpses.”

— George Bernard Shaw

260. “The frontier between hell and heaven is only the difference between two ways of looking at things.”

— George Bernard Shaw

261. “If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else.”

— George Bernard Shaw

262. “You can easily find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy.”

— George Bernard Shaw

263. “Don’t waste time collecting other people’s autographs; rather devote it to making your own autograph worth collecting.”

— George Bernard Shaw

264. “Remember that the progress of the world depends on your knowing better than your elders.”

— George Bernard Shaw

265. “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

266. “Being hurt by someone you truly care about leaves a hole in you heart that only love can fill.”

— George Bernard Shaw

267. “You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother’s milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.”

— George Bernard Shaw

268. “God is on the side of the big battalions.”

— George Bernard Shaw

269. “In the right key one can say anything. In the wrong key, nothing: the only delicate part is the establishment of the key.”

— George Bernard Shaw

270. “I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.”

— George Bernard Shaw

271. “Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.”

— George Bernard Shaw

272. “The joy in life is to be used for a purpose. I want to be used up when I die.”

— George Bernard Shaw

273. “Reformers have the idea that change can be achieved by brute sanity.”

— George Bernard Shaw

274. “I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.”

— George Bernard Shaw

275. “I love little children too but I don’t cut off their heads and stick them in vases.”

— George Bernard Shaw

276. “Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.”

— George Bernard Shaw

277. “The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.”

— George Bernard Shaw

278. “If you strike a child, take care that you strike it in anger, even at the risk of maiming it for life. A blow in cold blood neither can nor should be forgiven.”

— George Bernard Shaw

279. “I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.”

— George Bernard Shaw

280. “Defeatism is the wretchedest of policies.”

— George Bernard Shaw

281. “The real moment of success is not the moment apparent to the crowd.”

— George Bernard Shaw

282. “Hate is the revenge of a coward intimidated.”

— George Bernard Shaw

283. “When commenting on the turmoil and disorder of the world, If the other planets are inhabited, they must be using this earth as their insane asylum.”

— George Bernard Shaw

284. “When a thing is funny, search it carefully for a hidden truth.”

— George Bernard Shaw

285. “How you ought properly to spell ‘fish’ in English: ‘goti’ .”

— George Bernard Shaw

286. “Our lives are shaped not as much by our experiences as by our expectations.”

— George Bernard Shaw

287. “If Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters.”

— George Bernard Shaw

288. “A genius is a person who is seeing further and probing deeper than other people has a different set of ethical valuations from their and has energy enough to give effect to this extra vision and its valuations in whatever manner best suits his or her.”

— George Bernard Shaw

289. “War can so easily be gilt with romance and heroism and solemn national duty and patriotism and the like by persons whose superficial literary and oratorical talent covers an abyss of Godforsaken folly.”

— George Bernard Shaw

290. “If there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It’s in the nature of governments to tell lies.”

— George Bernard Shaw

291. “It would positively be a relief to me to dig Shakespeare up and throw stones at him.”

— George Bernard Shaw

292. “Oh, well, if you want original conversations, you’d better go and talk to yourself.”

— George Bernard Shaw

293. “Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.”

— George Bernard Shaw

294. “Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

296. “Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous.”

— George Bernard Shaw

297. “Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.”

— George Bernard Shaw

298. “Don’t think you can frighten me by telling me that I am alone. France is alone. God is alone. And the loneliness of God is His strength.”

— George Bernard Shaw

299. “All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions. All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions, and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”

— George Bernard Shaw

300. “The fact that we can become accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to.”

— George Bernard Shaw