Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

When you go to heaven, Ann, you will be frightfully conscious of your wings for the first year or so. When you meet your relatives there, and they persist in treating you as if you were still a mortal, you will not be able to bear them. You will try to get into a circle which has never known you except as an angel.

CHARLES. And the courts have declared that your judges were full of corruption and cozenage, fraud and malice. JOAN. Not they. They were as honest a lot of poor fools as ever burned their betters.

I need not repeat familiar arguments about the waste of teachers' time, and the difficulties thrown in the way of English children trying to learn their own language; or the fact that nobody without a visual memory for words ever succeeds in spelling conventionally, however highly educated he or she may be.

You will be welcome in hell, Senora. Hell is the home of honor, duty, justice, and the rest of the seven deadly virtues. All the wickedness on earth is done in their name: where else but in hell should they have their reward? Have I not told you that the truly damned are those who are happy in hell?

What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day.

Marriage is the most licentious of human institutions . . . that is the secret of its popularity.

I have examined Man's wonderful inventions. And I tell you that in the arts of life man invents nothing; but in the arts of death he outdoes Nature herself, and produces by chemistry and machinery all the slaughter of plague, pestilence and famine.

ANARCHIST. I told you to begin by abolishing the State. Now we are all lost.

Wilde's permanent celebrity belongs to literature, and only his transient notoriety to police news.

It's a dangerous thing to be married right up to the hilt, like my daughter's husband. The man is at home all day, like a damned soul in hell.

One hardly knows which is the more appalling: the abjectness of the credulity or the flippancy of the scepticism. — Shaw's Preface

El cristianismo podría ser bueno si alguien intentara practicarlo.

Dont be afraid: she never comes to words with anyone now, poor woman! respectability has broke all the spirit out of her.

Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly.

I have always made you my companions and friends, and allowed you perfect freedom to do and say whatever you liked, so long as you liked what I could approve of.

what is a Don Juan? Vulgarly, a libertine.

Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby!

Dancing: the vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music.

Literature is too full of 'acknowledgments' and squabbles about originality...

I appeal to the chemists to discover a humane gas that will kill instantly and painlessly. In short - a gentlemanly gas deadly by all means, but humane, not cruel.

COKANE [looking compassionately at him] Ah, my dear fellow, the love of money is the root of all evil. LICKCHEESE. Yes, sir; and we'd all like to have the tree growing in our garden.

CHARTERIS [unfolding his arms in terror] No, please. Dont. As a philosopher, it's my business to tell other people the truth; but it's not their business to tell it to me. I dont like it: it hurts.

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one's business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

Oh, it's a fine life, the life of the gutter. It's real: it's warm: it's violent: you can feel it through the thickest skin: you can taste it and smell it without any training or any work. Not like Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art.