Quotes from George Bernard Shaw

If at age 20 you are not a Communist then you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not a Capitalist then you have no brains.

It's a pity youth is wasted on the young.

People always get tired of one another. I grow tired of myself whenever I am left alone for ten minutes, and I am certain that I am fonder of myself than anyone can be of another person.

If you leave the smallest corner of your head vacant for a moment, other people's opinions will rush in from all quarters.

Though the Life Force supplies us with its own purpose, it has no other brains to work with than those it has painfully and imperfectly evolved in our heads.

I do not, like the Fundamentalists, believe that creation stopped six thousand years ago after a week of hard work. Creation is going on all the time.

A day's work is a day's work, neither more nor less, and the man or woman who does it needs a day's sustenance, a night's repose and due leisure, whether they be painter or ploughman.

Nothing makes a man so selfish as work.

If more than ten percent of the public likes a painting, it should be burned.

To make Democracy work, you need an aristocratic democracy. To make Aristocracy work, you need a democratic aristocracy.

I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.

I have a strong feeling that I shall be glad when I am dead and done for - scrapped at last to make room for somebody better, cleverer, more perfect than myself.

I have to live for others and not for myself: that's middle-class morality.

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

You can always tell an old soldier by the inside of his holsters and cartridge boxes. The young ones carry pistols and cartridges; the old ones, grub.

If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.

I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation.

If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative litt

When I was a young man I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. I didn't want to be a failure so I did ten times more work.

There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.

I wish people would stop talking about my birthday.

An Englishman does everything on principle: he fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles.