George Bernard Shaw Quotes

You're not a man, you're a machine.

What is proposed is nothing but the replacement of the old unintelligent, inevitable, almost unconscious fertility by an intelligently controlled, conscious fertility, and the elimination of the mere voluptuary from the evolutionary process.

Common people do not pray; they only beg.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it well, ever loses his self-respect.

The longer I live the more I see that I am never wrong about anything, and that all the pains I have so humbly taken to verify my notions have only wasted my time.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

The American white relegates the black to the rank of shoeshine boy; and he concludes from this that the black is good for nothing but shining shoes.

Society, with all its prisons and bayonets and whips and ostracisms and starvations, is powerless in the face of the Anarchist who is prepared to sacrifice his own life in the battle with it. Our natural safety from the cheap and devastating explosives which every Russian student can make ... lies in the fact that brave and resolute men, when they are rascals, will not risk their skins for the good of humanity, and, when they are sympathetic enough to care for humanity, abhor murder, and never commit it until their consciences are outraged beyond endurance. The remedy is, then, simply not to outrage their consciences.

Now take Stalin himself. He is 'neither duke nor peer', not a king, not a chancellor, not a dictator, not a Prime Minister, not an archbishop, not entitled to salutes enforced by youths in coloured shirts, but simply secretary of the supreme controlling organ of the hierarchy, subject to dismissal at five minutes' notice if he does not give satisfaction. This position he has attained through the survival of the fittest, and has held through the years of the most appalling vicissitudes that ever attended the birth pangs of a new civilisation.

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.

All truths begin as blasphemies.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn't want to be governed.

Law is never so necessary as when it has no ethical significance whatever, and is pure law for the sake of law. The law that compels me to keep to the left when driving along Oxford Street is ethically senseless, as is shewn by the fact that keeping to the right answers equally well in Paris; and it certainly destroys my freedom to choose my side; but by enabling me to count on everyone else keeping to the left also, thus making traffic possible and safe, it enlarges my life and sets my mind free for nobler issues. Most laws, in short, are not the expression of the ethical verdicts of the community, but pure etiquette and nothing else. What they express is the fact that over most of the field of social life there are wide limits within which it does not matter what people do, though it matters enormously whether under given circumstances you can depend on their all doing the same thing.

The risks of liberty we must let everyone take; but the risks of ignorance and self-helplessness are another matter.

Човешките същества са единствените животни, от които аз съм напълно и истински уплашен.