Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

But a lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.

We must be conventional, Jack, or we are so cruelly, so vilely misunderstood. Even you, who are a man, cannot say what you think without being misunderstood and vilified

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

without good manners, human society would be intolerable and impossible

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it.

Charles. Oh, your voices, your voices. Why don't the voices come to me? I am king, not you! Joan. They do come to you, but you do not hear them. You have not sat in the field in the evening listening for them. When the angelus rings, you cross yourself and have done with it. But if you prayed from your heart and listened to the thrilling of the bells in the air after they stopped ringing, you would hear the voices as well as I do.

if there was nothing wrong in the world there wouldn't be anything for us to do

Getting over an unfavorable impression is ever so much easier than living up to an ideal.

He never does a proper thing without giving an improper reason for it.

There are no perfectly honorable men; but every true man has one main point of honor and a few minor ones.

People don't have their virtues and vices in sets: they have them anyhow: all mixed.

it annoys me to see people comfortable when they ought to be uncomfortable; and I insist on making them think in order to bring them to conviction of sin. If you don't like my preaching you must lump it. I really cannot help it. In the preface to my Plays for Puritans I

The solid earth sways like the treacherous sea beneath the feet of men and spirits alike when the innocent are slain in the name of law, and their wrongs are undone by slandering the pure of heart.

Old-fashioned people think you can have a soul without money. They think the less money you have, the more soul you have. Young people nowadays know better. A soul is a very expensive thing to keep: much more so than a motor car.

Some donkeys have amazing luck.

Morality can go to its father the devil.

Beware of false knowledge, it is more dangers than ignorance.

Cruelty would be delicious if one could only find some sort of cruelty that didn't really hurt.

Style is a sort of melody that comes into my sentences by itself. If a writer says what he has to say as accurately and effectively as he can, his style will take care of itself.

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.

The man or woman who feels strong enough for two, seeks for every other quality in a partner than strength.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

The British and Americans are two people separated by a common language.