Top 500 George Bernard Shaw Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “You have nothing to do but mention the quantum theory, and people will take your voice for the voice of science, and belive anything.”

— George Bernard Shaw

352. “The more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is.”

— George Bernard Shaw

353. “Effectiveness of assertion is the alpha and omega of style.”

— George Bernard Shaw

354. “The criminal law is no use to decent people.”

— George Bernard Shaw

355. “Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again. If all economists were laid end to end they would not reach a conclusion.”

— George Bernard Shaw

356. “The real pleasure of one’s life is the devotion to a great objective of one’s consideration.”

— George Bernard Shaw

357. “Seemingly unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. Much progress, therefore, depends on such people.”

— George Bernard Shaw

358. “Marriage is to me apostasy, profanation of the sanctuary of my soul, violation of my manhood, sale of my birthright, shameful surrender, ignominious capitulation, acceptance of defeat.”

— George Bernard Shaw

359. “I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical.”

— George Bernard Shaw

360. “You have set up in New York Harbor a monstrous idol which you call Liberty. The only thing that remains to complete that monument is to put on its pedestal the inscription written by Dante on the gate of hell: All hope abandon ye who enter here.”

— George Bernard Shaw

361. “Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.”

— George Bernard Shaw

362. “It is easy – terribly easy – to shake a man’s faith in himself. To take advantage of that to break a man’s spirit is devil’s work.”

— George Bernard Shaw

363. “I am justified. For I chose wisdom and the knowledge of good and evil ; and now there is no evil; and wisdom and good are one. It is enough.”

— George Bernard Shaw

364. “It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.”

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

366. “Taxes are the chief business of a conqueror of the world.”

— George Bernard Shaw

367. “Schools must not become the agencies through which propaganda advocated by any section of society is spread. The method of control always a crucial problem should be in harmony with the fundamental values and principles of the states and the entire e.”

— George Bernard Shaw

368. “There is only one person an English girl hates more than she hates her elder sister; and that is her mother.”

— George Bernard Shaw

369. “I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

370. “If women were as fastidious as men, morally or physically, there would be an end of the race.”

— George Bernard Shaw

371. “Spend all you have before you die, and do not outlive yourself.”

— George Bernard Shaw

372. “Those who understand evil pardon it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

373. “We educate one another; and we cannot do this if half of us consider the other half not good enough to talk to.”

— George Bernard Shaw

374. “All my life affection has been showered upon me, and every forward step I have made has been taken in spite of it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

375. “The salvation of the world depends on the men who will not take evil good-humouredly, and whose laughter destroys the fool instead of encouraging him.”

— George Bernard Shaw

376. “Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.”

— George Bernard Shaw

377. “Few people think more than two or three times a year; I have made an international reputation for myself by thinking once or twice a week.”

— George Bernard Shaw

378. “I was a freethinker before I knew how to think.”

— George Bernard Shaw

379. “The capacity of any conqueror is more likely than not to be an illusion produced by the incapacity of his adversary.”

— George Bernard Shaw

380. “Happiness and Beauty are by-products.”

— George Bernard Shaw

381. “Only Lawyers and mental defectives are automatically exempt for jury duty.”

— George Bernard Shaw

382. “Leisure may be defined as free activity, labor as compulsory activity. Leisure does what it likes, labor does what it must, the compulsion being that of Nature, which in these latitudes leaves men no choice between labor and starvation.”

— George Bernard Shaw

383. “There is nothing in religion but fiction.”

— George Bernard Shaw

384. “The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.”

— George Bernard Shaw

385. “Literature is like any other trade; you will never sell anything unless you go to the right shop.”

— George Bernard Shaw

386. “The doctor learns that if he gets ahead of the superstitions of his patients he is a ruined man; and the result is that he instinctively takes care not to get ahead of them.”

— George Bernard Shaw

387. “If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.”

— George Bernard Shaw

388. “Women have been a ghastly nuisance in my life.”

— George Bernard Shaw

389. “Our ideals, like the gods of old, are constantly demanding human sacrifices.”

— George Bernard Shaw

390. “A woman whose face looked as if it had been made of sugar and someone had licked it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

391. “The cinema is going to form the mind of England. The national conscience, the national ideals and tests of conduct, will be those of the film.”

— George Bernard Shaw

392. “My schooling did me a great deal of harm and no good whatever; it was simply dragging a child’s soul through the dirt.”

— George Bernard Shaw

393. “I assume that to prevent illness in later life, you should never have been born at all.”

— George Bernard Shaw

394. “A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there.”

— George Bernard Shaw

395. “Martyrdom, sir, is what these people like: it is the only way in which a man can become famous without ability.”

— George Bernard Shaw

396. “A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a person’s nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.”

— George Bernard Shaw

397. “Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.”

— George Bernard Shaw

398. “Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible; and don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.”

— George Bernard Shaw

399. “Although I cannot lay an egg, I am a very good judge of omelettes.”

— George Bernard Shaw

400. “Those who are looking for paradise on Earth should come and see Dubrovnik.”

— George Bernard Shaw