Top 500 George Bernard Shaw Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “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

Featured in: Book Quotes

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

— George Bernard Shaw

403. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

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

— George Bernard Shaw

406. “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

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

— George Bernard Shaw

408. “That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them. But it’s horribly lonely not to hear someone else talk sometimes.”

— George Bernard Shaw

409. “We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time, or we shall stick in the mud. Yet neither must we undertake a new world as catastrophic Utopians, and wreck our civilization in our hurry to mend it.”

— George Bernard Shaw

410. “Home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse.”

— George Bernard Shaw

411. “Must then a Christ perish in torment in every age to save those that have no imagination.”

— George Bernard Shaw

412. “The pianoforte is the most important of all musical instruments; its invention was to music what the invention of printing was to poetry.”

— George Bernard Shaw

413. “Newspaper : A device unable to distinguish between a bicycle accident and the collapse of civilisation.”

— George Bernard Shaw

414. “What you are to do without me I cannot imagine.”

— George Bernard Shaw

415. “The nation’s morals are like its teeth: the more decayed they are the more it hurts to touch them.”

— George Bernard Shaw

416. “My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I’m a free citizen.”

— George Bernard Shaw

417. “I can’t turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the voice and the face. They are not you.”

— George Bernard Shaw

418. “I have studied him – the wonderful man – and in my opinion far from being an anti-Christ he must be called the saviour of humanity.”

— George Bernard Shaw

419. “Life is like a flame that is always burning itself out...”

— George Bernard Shaw

420. “Golf is typical capitalist luncay.”

— George Bernard Shaw

421. “Anarchism is a game at which the police can beat you.”

— George Bernard Shaw

422. “Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another.”

— George Bernard Shaw

423. “Money is indeed the most important thing in the world; and all sound and successful personal and national morality should have this fact for its basis.”

— George Bernard Shaw

424. “There is the eternal war between those who are in the world for what they can get out of it and those who are in the world to make it a better place for everybody to live in.”

— George Bernard Shaw

425. “The best place to find God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.”

— George Bernard Shaw

426. “To me the sole hope of human salvation lies in teaching.”

— George Bernard Shaw

427. “Every man deserves to be judged in the context of his times.”

— George Bernard Shaw

428. “I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could.”

— George Bernard Shaw

429. “Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?”

— George Bernard Shaw

430. “In heaven an angel is nobody in particular.”

— George Bernard Shaw

431. “Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.”

— George Bernard Shaw

Featured in: Real Quotes

432. “You have a choice of trusting the natural stability of gold, or the honesty and intelligence of members of government.”

— George Bernard Shaw

433. “A married man is a man with a past, while a bachelor is a man with a future.”

— George Bernard Shaw

434. “The most tragic thing in the world is a man of genius who is not a man of honor.”

— George Bernard Shaw

435. “A perpetual holiday is a good working definition of hell.”

— George Bernard Shaw

436. “It’s prudent to gain the whole world and lose your own soul. But don’t forget that your soul sticks to you if you stick to it; but the world has a way of slipping through your fingers.”

— George Bernard Shaw

437. “Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.”

— George Bernard Shaw

438. “The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.”

— George Bernard Shaw

439. “Violence is the repartee of the illiterate.”

— George Bernard Shaw

440. “A man without an address is a vagabond; a man with two addresses is a libertine.”

— George Bernard Shaw

441. “What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.”

— George Bernard Shaw

442. “Life is a disease; and the only difference between on man and another is the stage of the disease at which he lives.”

— George Bernard Shaw

443. “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.”

— George Bernard Shaw

444. “Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.”

— George Bernard Shaw

445. “Take the utmost care to get well born and well brought up.”

— George Bernard Shaw

446. “Property is organized robbery.”

— George Bernard Shaw

447. “No man fully capable of his own language ever masters another.”

— George Bernard Shaw

448. “Trade unionism is not socialism. It is the capitalism of the proletariat.”

— George Bernard Shaw

449. “We must reform society before we can reform ourselves.”

— George Bernard Shaw

450. “Where there is no religion, hypocrisy becomes good taste.”

— George Bernard Shaw