George Bernard Shaw Quotes

Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist (1856–1950)

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George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist with a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory. He wrote more than sixty plays, including such works as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1913) and Saint Joan (1923). Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925.

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Alternative Names: Bernard Shaw • G.B. Shaw • G. Bernard Shaw

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If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.

Science never solves a problem without creating ten more

In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.

Custom will reconcile people to any atrocity, and fashion will drive them to acquire any custom.

The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.

I like flowers, I also like children, but I do not chop their heads off and keep them in bowls of water around the house.

It is a woman's business to get married as soon as possible, and a man's
to keep unmarried as long as he can.

Lack of money is the root of all evil.

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.

Men are wise in proportion, not to their experience, but to their capacity for experience.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven't and don't.

I want to be thoroughly used up when I die, for the harder I work, the more I live. I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is sort of a splendid torch which I have a hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it over to future generations.

The man with toothache thinks everyone happy whose teeth are sound. The poverty stricken man makes the same mistake about the rich man.

She has mischievious moments when she wishes she could get him alone on a desert island...

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.