Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

The prototypic Don Juan, invented early in the XVI century by a Spanish monk, was

Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing: age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

She is to him the reality of romance, the leaner good sense of nonsense, the unveiling of his eyes, the freeing of his soul, the abolition of time, place and circumstance, the etherealization of his blood into rapturous rivers of the very water of life itself, the revelation of all the mysteries and the sanctification of all the dogmas.

At present there is not a single credible established religion in the world.

You came clothed with the virtue of humility; and because God blessed your enterprises accordingly, you have stained yourself with the sin of pride.

But I cant stand saying one thing when everyone knows I mean another. Whats the use in such hypocrisy? If people arrange the world that way for women, theres no good pretending it's arranged the other way...

If other people are going to talk, conversation becomes impossible.

Professor Henry Higgins: Oh, Pickering, for God's sake stop being dashed and do something!

Colonel Hugh Pickering - Well, I'm dashed!

and I wont be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I cant have kindness, I'll have independence.

A movement which is confined to philosophers and honest men can never exercise any real political influence: there are too few of them. Until a movement shows itself capable of spreading among brigands, it can never hope for a political majority.

your uncle Howard is one of the most harmless of men—much nicer than most professional people. Of course he does dreadful things as a judge; but then if you take a man and pay him 5,000 pounds a year to be wicked, and praise him for it, and have policemen and courts and laws and juries to drive him into it so that he can't help doing it, what can you expect?

The Sierra is no better than Bloomsbury when once the novelty has worn off. Besides, these mountains make you dream of women—of women with magnificent hair.

It is the tame elephants who enjoy capturing the wild ones.

I can do without anybody. I have my own soul: my own spark of divine fire.

I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

Lady Utterword: What a lovely night! It seems made for us. Hector: The night takes no interest in us. What are we to the night?

I find that socialism is often misunderstood by its least intelligent supporters and opponents to mean simply unrestrained indulgence of our natural propensity to heave bricks at respectable persons.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

It is this consideration of other people or rather this cowardly fear of them which we call consideration that makes us the sentimental slaves we are. To consider you, as you call it, is to substitute your will for my own. How if it be a baser will than mine?

I am sorry to say that it is a common practice with romancers to announce their hero as a man of extraordinary genius, and to leave his works entirely to the reader's imagination; so that at the end of the book you whisper to yourself ruefully that but for the author's solemn preliminary assurance you should hardly have given the gentleman credit for ordinary good sense.

I don't say it was a bad one. But bad or good, I didn't choose to be cut to your measure. And I won't be cut to it.

You can't rationally argue out what wasn't rationally argued in.

The surest way to ruin a man who doesn't know how to handle money is to give him some.