Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

Start with the belief that your life can indeed be changed, and that you have the power to change it.

Not everybody is strong enough to endure life without an anesthetic. Drink probably averts more gross crime than it causes.

Of all the damnable waste of human life that ever was invented, clerking is the worst.

The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

Dancing is a very crude attempt to get into the rhythm of life.

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

I want to destroy ownership in order that possession and enjoyment may be raised to the highest point in every section of the community.

General consultant to mankind.

It's so hard to know what to do when one wishes earnestly to do right.

You cannot be a hero without being a coward.

Martyrdom: The only way a man can become famous without ability.

Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.

If women were particular about men's characters, they would never get married at all.

If I own a large part of Scotland, I can turn the people off the land practically into the sea or across the sea. I can take women in child-bearing and throw them into the snow and leave them there. That has been done. I can do it for no better reason than I think it is better to shoot deer on the land than allow people to live on it.

The only secrets are the secrets that keep themselves.

The Old Testament God is a person with body parts and passions. The Church of England God has neither body, parts nor passions, and is therefore not a person.

I never resist temptation, because I have found that things that are bad for me do not tempt me.

He knows nothing and thinks he knows everything. That points clearly to a political career.

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.

[...] any fool can make a discovery. Every baby has to discover more in the first years of its life than Roger Bacon ever discovered in his laboratory.

The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn't matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

The only person who acts sensibly is my tailor. He takes my measure anew every time he sees me. Everyone else goes by their old measurements.