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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My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.

The great advantage of a hotel is that it's a refuge from home life.

We don't bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don't dress well and we've no manners.

I'm only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler. I don't like beer.

Die Walküre is endured by the average man because it contains four scenes for which he would sit out a Scotch sermon, or even a House of Commons debate. These are the love duet in the first act, Brunnhilde's announcement of death in the second, the ride of the Valkyries and the 'fire-charm' in the third. For them the ordinary playgoer endures hours of Wotan, with Christopher Sly's prayer in his heart. 'Would 'twere over!' Now, I am one of those elect souls who are deeply moved by Wotan. I grant you that as a long-winded, one-eyed gentleman backing a certain champion in a fight and henpecked out of his fancy because his wife objects to the moral character of the champion, he is a dreary person indeed . . . but to one who has understood all its beauties, its lofty aspirations, its tragedy, there is nothing trivial, nothing tedious in Die Walküre.

But no public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means; and I have no reason to hope that Mr Coote may be an exception to the rule.

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it...

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it...

The old Whigs and new Tories of the school of Cobden and Bright, the "Philosophic Radicals," the economists of whom Bastiat is the type, Lord Wemyss and Lord Bramwell, Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Auberon Herbert, Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Leonard Courtney: any of these is, in England, a more typical Anarchist than Bakounin. They distrust State action, and are jealous advocates of the prerogative of the individual, proposing to restrict the one and to extend the other as far as is humanly possible, in opposition to the Social-Democrat, who proposes to democratize the State and throw upon it the whole work of organizing the national industry, thereby making it the most vital organ in the social body.