Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

Everybody has choices, Mother. The poorest girl alive may not be able to choose between being Queen of England or Principal of Newnham; but she can choose between rag-picking and flower-selling, according to her taste. People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make them.

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.

Common people do not pray; they only beg.

The word morality, if we met it in the Bible, would surprise us as much as the word telephone or motor car.

Set me anything to do as a task, and it is inconceivable the desire I have to do something else.

When you vote, you only change the names of the cabinet. When you shoot, you pull down governments, inaugurate new epochs, abolish old orders and set up new.

People do not become great by doing great things. They do great things because they are great.

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.

I like a bit of mongrel myself, whether it's a man or a dog.

Patriotism is a pernicious, psychopathic form of idiocy.

O God that madest this beautiful earth, when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, O Lord, how long?

I find it easy to forgive the man who invented a devilish instrument like dynamite, but how can one ever forgive the diabolical mind that invented the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?

Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.

Decency cannot be discussed without indecency!

That is what all poets do: they talk to themselves out loud; and the world overhears them

Not that I disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinions and for those of all my characters, pleasant and unpleasant. They are all right from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually their own.

Thus, I blush to add, you can not be a philosopher and a good man, though you may be a philosopher and a great one.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants – and not all of them – have any agreed speech value. Consequently no man can teach himself what it should sound like from reading it; and it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.

Greatness is one of the sensations of littleness

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

What man really wishes to do he will find a means of doing.

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.