Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

There may be some doubt as to who are the best people to have charge of children, but there can be no doubt that parents are the worst.

You cannot have power for good without having power for evil too. Even mother's milk nourishes murderers as well as heroes.

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

I tell you that as long as I can conceive something better than myself I cannot be easy unless I am striving to bring it into existence or clearing the way for it.

If 'Pygmalion' is not good enough for your friends with its own verbal music, their talent must be altogether extraordinary.

Music is the brandy of the damned.

Most people go to their grave with their music inside them.

Hell is full of musical amateurs.

Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses.

From Mozart I learnt to say important things in a conversational way.

I am highly susceptible to the force of all truly religious music, especially to the music of my own church, the church of Shelley, Michelangelo, and Beethoven.

Forgive him, for he believes that the customs of his tribe are the laws of nature!

A miracle is an event which creates faith. That is the purpose and nature of miracles. Frauds deceive. An event which creates faith does not deceive: therefore it is not a fraud, but a miracle.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it....

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

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.

And so, to the end of history, murder shall breed murder, always in the name of right and honor and peace, until the gods are tired of blood and create a race that can understand.

It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

We are the living graves of murdered beasts, slaughtered to satisfy our appetites. How can we hope in this world to attain the peace we say we are so anxious for?

Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it.

In the arts of peace Man is a bungler.

Heartbreak is life educating us.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

The world was to Shakespeare a great stage of fools on which he was utterly bewildered. His pregnant observations of life are not coordinated into any philosophy.