George Bernard Shaw Quotes

We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

A solider always assumes that he is going to shoot, not to be shot.

Common people do not pray; they only beg.

Рибата улавят с въдица, а човека с думи.

There is always danger for those who are afraid.

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 thirdclass carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

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

Wise kings wear shabby clothes, and leave the gold lace to the drum major.

[A]lthough I well know
how hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated subject to
maintain serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and who
keep all the best places for less important subjects which they profess without
originality and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he
overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heap
honors on him.

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.

Cusins: Call you poverty a crime?
Undershaft: The worst of crimes. All the other crimes are virtues beside it: all the other dishonors are chivalry itself by comparison. Poverty blights whole cities; spreads horrible pestilences; strikes dead the very souls of all who come within sight, sound or smell of it. What you call crime is nothing: a murder here and a theft there, a blow now and a curse then: what do they matter? they are only the accidents and illnesses of life: there are not fifty genuine professional criminals in London. But there are millions of poor people, abject people, dirty people, ill fed, ill clothed people. They poison us morally and physically: they kill the happiness of society: they force us to do away with our own liberties and to organize unnatural cruelties for fear they should rise against us and drag us down into their abyss. Only fools fear crime: we all fear poverty.

The sex relation is not a personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation.

I care for life, for humanity; and you are a part of it that has come my way and been built into my house. What more can you or anyone ask?

Journalists are too poorly paid in this country to know anything that is fit for publication.

Soldiering, my dear madam, is the coward's art of attacking mercilessly when you are strong, and keeping out of harm's way when you are weak. That is the whole secret of successful fighting. Get your enemy at a disadvantage; and never, on any account, fight him on equal terms.