Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

Liberty is the breath of life to nations.

How we lavish our money and worship on Shakespeare without in the least knowing why!

Usually I enjoy a first night as a surgeon enjoys an operation: this time I enjoyed it as a playgoer enjoys a pleasant performance.

Animals are my friends and I don't eat my friends.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing

Selama masih memiliki keinginan, saya mempunyai alasan untuk hidup.

The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

Here there is nothing but love and beauty. Ugh! it is like sitting for all eternity at the first act of a fashionable play, before the complications begin.

You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

No doubt there are slavish women as well as slavish men; and women, like men, admire those that are stronger than themselves.

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. I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.

God has given us a world that nothing but our own folly keeps from being a paradise.

Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you [Colonel Pickering], because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

Boasting about modesty is typical of the English.

La imaginación es el principio de la creación. Imaginamos lo que deseamos, queremos lo que imaginamos y, por fin, creamos lo que queremos.

Well, I've known over thirty men who've found out how to cure consumption. Why do people go on dying of it, Colly? Devilment I suppose!

The Romans have set fire to the Library of Alexandria) THEODOTUS: —What is burning there is the memory of mankind. CAESAR: —A shameful memory. Let it burn. THEODOTUS (wildly): —Will you destroy the past? CAESAR: —Ay, and build the future with its ruins.

It is not easy to make the best of both worlds when one of the worlds is preaching a Class War, and the other vigorously practising it. — Shaw's Preface

I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse. They were built only to serve.

Walpole has no intellect. A mere surgeon. A wonderful operator but, after all, what is operating? . . . . Manual labour.

MRS. FARRELL. I wouldnt compare risks run to bear living people into the world to risks run to blow them out of it. A mother's risk is jooty: a soldier's nothin but divilmint.

Self-denial is not a virtue: it is only the effect of prudence on rascality.

All truths begin as blasphemies.