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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Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.

The best brought-up children are those who have seen their parents as they are. Hypocrisy is not the parent's first duty.

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.

Where equality is undisputed, so also is subordination.

The duke inquires contemptuously whether his gamekeeper is the equal of the Astronomer Royal; but he insists that they shall both be hanged equally if they murder him.

He who confuses political liberty with freedom and political equality with similarity has never thought for five minutes about either.

If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.

Do not do unto others as you would expect they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.

Economy is the art of making the most of life. The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

The confusion of marriage with morality has done more to destroy the conscience of the human race than any other single error.

The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.

There is no love sincerer than the love of food.

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.

Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family.