Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.

What right has any human being to talk of bringing up a child? You do not bring up a tree or a plant. It brings itself up. You have to give it a fair chance by tilling the soil.

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

No man manages his affairs as well as a tree does

All great truths began as blasphemies.

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.

If there was twenty ways of telling the truth and only one way of telling a lie, the Government would find it out. It's in the nature of governments to tell lies.

Only in books has mankind known perfect truth, love and beauty.

The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.

I learned more from the first stupid woman who fell in love with me than ever my brains taught me.

We all go about longing for love: it is the first need of our natures, the loudest cry of our hearts.

My reputation grows with every failure.

All genuinely intellectual work is humorous.

I would like to take you seriously, but to do so would be an affront to your intelligence.

The minority is sometimes right; the majority always wrong.

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

We should all be obliged to appear before a board every five years and justify our existence... on pain of liquidation.

The natural term of the affection of the human animal for its offspring is six years.

Socialism, reduced to its simplest legal and practical expression, means the complete discarding of the institution of private property by transforming it into public property, and the division of the resultant public income equally and indiscriminately among the entire population.

The truth is the one thing that nobody will believe.

Truth telling is not compatible with the defence of the realm.

The righteous man takes his life in his hand whenever he utters the truth.

Telling the truth is the funniest joke in the world.